![]() Premature head wear proved to be a major issue, and when one DA88 needed an expensive replacement head after only 240 hours' use I put my foot down and refused to pay for it. Welcome to the digital age: three synchronised Tascam multitracks allowed simultaneous and noise‑free 24‑track recording, but brought with them their own frustrations. Result: severe audio dropouts and brain‑ache. More than once, I ejected a tape and found a loop of tape trailing outside its plastic case and snarled up inside the player. Originally designed as camcorder tapes, these Hi‑8 cassettes used 8mm tape that was thin, flimsy and prone to creasing. These digital eight‑tracks had a great sound and a sweet top end, but they brought their own problems.Recording 24‑track required three separate tapes, each of which lasted for nearly two hours and had to be formatted in real time prior to use. I opted instead for three Tascam digital eight‑track recorders (a pair of DA88s and a DA38), which could be synchronised and used as a 24‑track recording system. At that stage it would have been prudent to check out Notator Logic (as it was then called) or one of the other emergent PC‑based recording systems, but I was wary of computers having started out playing in a band, operating a mouse and keypad on a daily basis felt, to me, uncomfortably close to working in an office. By the end of 1993, the time had come to ditch analogue tape and go digital. Since the late '80s, I'd been mixing onto DAT tape (RIP), which sounded great, generated no tape hiss, required no calibration, failed to grow sonically dull after repeated plays and invariably ran at the right speed. I became paranoid, and from then on always recorded an A=440 tone on tape at the top of every track so I could check playback speed. The tape machine decided to make its own zany contribution by playing at slightly the wrong speed, creating a tuning discrepancy between the recorded material and the off‑tape sequenced keyboards which Mr. But my love affair with the brown ribbony stuff turned sour when I was mixing a song called 'Your Lucky Star', a tribute to the maverick producer Joe Meek. ![]() I enjoyed the physical business of handling tape: fiddling around with splicing blocks, razor blades, leader tape, pinch rollers, take‑up spools and isopropyl alcohol (used to clean tape recorder heads, not for recreational purposes, you understand) made me feel like an old‑school studio pro. Following the closure of Spaceward, a Fostex E16 became the centrepiece of the Stewart/Gaskin studio. Our domestic setup then was based around a 16‑track tape recorder, supplemented by much off‑tape sequenced MIDI material. I didn't fancy looking around for a new work environment, only to see it shut down six months later, so we simply bought more kit and carried on recording at home, occasionally hiring outside facilities when necessary. But for us, the closure posed a dilemma: we'd been regularly hiring commercial studios since 1981, but now many were struggling to survive. ![]() The engineer, Owen Morris, went on to produce hugely successful albums for Oasis and the Verve, so no harm done there. Throughout the '80s, I and my vocalist partner Barbara Gaskin spent many happy months in the studio recording on 24‑track, two‑inch tape - ah! I still remember its smell (the tape, I mean, not the studio). That all changed one day in autumn 1988 when the owner of the East Anglian recording facility we were working in strode into the premises and announced out of the blue to our young engineer that the studio was about to close and he was henceforth out of a job. While mixing the tracks, it occurred to me how things have changed since I started recording in the late '60s, and I thought it would be instructive to chart some of that evolution. However, putting aside its musical merits (or otherwise), my project has the dubious distinction of spanning several eras of audio, which posed some 'interesting' (in the Chinese sense) challenges when it came to finishing it. No big deal: practically every musician one runs into on the Internet seems to be in the same position. ![]() Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin (below) working at Spaceward Studios in the early '80s.ĭave Stewart's career has spanned several generations of music technology, and for his latest project he faced the challenge of bringing his old multitracks and MIDI sequences into the computer age.Ībout a year ago, I finished making an album.
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