Dumping From Tascam 388 to Mbox 1

[cavalry thrill]

So,
I'm sorta new at the pro tools thing - I've been analog guy for a while. I have an mbox1 with PTLE 7.3.1 and a macbook. Last weekend the band recorded drums and bass on my trusty tascam 388. Now we're planning on dumping the results into PT and finishing the recording. We are first planning on mixing the drums stereo and send them to the two ins on the mbox, then we would dump the bass and a room mic recording of the drums. Are there any syncing or timing issues I should be aware of. Any advice, tips or tricks?

thanks in advance.

zac

[MoreSpaceEcho]

Are there any syncing or timing issues I should be aware of.

yep.

Any advice, tips or tricks?

it's not gonna stay in sync.

you could either:
1. make the drums mono, bus those to the left input and the bass to the right.
2. buy whatever digi product will give you more than 2 inputs at a time
3. do what you were intending to do and then go back and line the bass up by hand. tedious but doable.

wait, sorry, i just reread your post and saw you're planning on running the room mic and the bass in as your second pass. i think you are asking for hell if you don't do all the drums together. syncing the bass back up with the drums will be tedious enough, but trying to get the room mic in sync with the other drum mics is going to be a phasey nightmare and essentially impossible to get right.

sorry.

[curtiswyant]

I would avoid syncing in post. You can get it close but it always feels "off." I use a Delta 1010 (8 in/out) with my 388 and love it. They're around $300 on ebay.

[cavalry thrill]

what about punching in a single kick drum hit from my drum machine across all of the tracks at the beginning and end and using that as a reference.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

a good idea, but alas, your problem is that the tape speed isn't exactly constant. so the tracks will start out in sync but will gradually get more and more out of sync.

[cavalry thrill]

any time code devices that may work?

[MoreSpaceEcho]

there might be...but i really think you'd be way better off getting an 001 or whatever. something with 8 channels of conversion so you can just dump everything over at once and not have to worry about it. i think anything else is just gonna be a workaround...

[cavalry thrill]

YEAH - I realized I know a guy who will do it for $40 and save me the headache - but I will have a backache from moving the 388.

z

[MoreSpaceEcho]

trust me the backache will be much less than the headache would be!

[Gebo]

With the extra time its going to take you to sync everything up, you could get a second job, and work enough hours to buy an interface with 8 inputs. The 388 is awesome, but not consistent enough for that sort of work.

[mjl]

Hi curtiswyant,


I'm about to start recording on a 388 and have been thinking about various ways to get the sounds on to my computer. Do you use mic preamps with the 1010 when you dump the tracks down? Or are the outs on the Tascam considered to be a "line level source?"

[austin]

We are first planning on mixing the drums stereo and send them to the two ins on the mbox,

I dealt with a similar limitation recently (dumping into PT via an Mbox -- but from my humble 414 rather than a 388) and I just decided to mix all of what I had (drums bass keys) down to stereo, and commit to it right then. Not the approach for everyone, obviously, but it was actually fun imposing that limitation on myself. When you think about it, it's not too different from the way you'd bounce tracks when doing the whole recording on a 4- or 8-track.


By the way, I am a longtime TOMB lurker, first-time poster... so, hello everyone! (I feel like I know you already...)

--Austin.

[Gebo]

Or are the outs on the Tascam considered to be a "line level source?"

The "Tape Outs" are line level.

[the velour fog]

Or are the outs on the Tascam considered to be a "line level source?"

The "Tape Outs" are line level.

as are the pgm outs, but they allow you to use the mixer section instead of just pulling straight from tape.

[greatmagnet]

I agree you should find someone with multiple ins and save the headache, but just for the record as an interesting technique I've used....

aligning multiple batches of tracks coming in from a tape machine CAN be done with a minimum of fuss, but what you need is a common "start" and "finish" tone (ideally a snare hit) that spans all eight tracks of your 388 which is recorded (and therefore happens) at the same time on each track. You would also need to have the ability to "grab" and manually time-stretch each track in ProTools LE...Digital Performer can do this but don't know if Protools LE does? Anyone?

1.) You would dump your stereo drum mix first as-planned, then on to whatever other instruments you can dump in two-at-a-time bit-by-bit as you had also envisioned. When all those tracks are in PT, you'll look at them and see that common "hit" at the beginning and end of each sound file. Nudge each track around until the beginning "hit" matches perfectly from track-to-track.

2.) Select all the tracks together and "scissor-tool" them together so that they are all split right at that common "hit" point near the beginning.

3.) Then scroll to the end of the arrangement. After aligning the "hits" at the beginning of the song, these end-of-song "hits" will NOT be in alignment with each other because of the inconsistencies of the physical medium of tape (as affected by temperature) and the variations in the 388's motor speed. They will all be subtly off from each other.

4.) One-by-one individually scissor-tool the tracks right where that end "hit" happens.

5.) Then, find the track that came out SHORTEST where that end scissor was done. At this point simply time-squash the rest of the tracks until their end scissor points are the same as this shortest track. Then you can just delete the leftover track "tails" that will be floating in front and behind your two scissor points per-track as all the song information you need ocurs between those snare hits.

6.) The reason I say to align everything to the shortest track is that time compression seems to retain most of it's original fidelity, whereas time-stretching always fucks up your tone in a big way. The losses to tone with the time compression will be not noticeable because you'll find the difference in end times between tracks is so minimal (fractions of a second over the course of the entire song most likely) that the computer really isn't rearranging the soundwaves a whole heckofalot overall.

Now you know the hard way. Maybe.

I have an Otari 8-channel machine with LOTS of ins and outs to my DAW but I still use theis method when clients come to me wanting a record recorded in analog but have arrangements too complex for an eight-channel machine. We'll do their basic tracks on the Otari in a first pass, dump 'em to the computer (still as multiple tracks, though) and bounce all that down to a rough mono mix in the DAW. That mono mix will then be recorded back to the Otari and will serve as a backing track for the artist to build up seven more tracks with. Then THAT batch of eight will get dumped to the computer and aligned with the first batch of eight as-per my aobve method, but using the mono mix in the computer versus the mono mix coming back off the tape machine as my alignment tool for where the song begins and ends. Then I will repeat as-necesssary. It works...I swear!

Too much coffee this morning!