Until now I have been using a normal domestic cassette deck to make master copies of my recordings. The results are not great, and I would like to improve on the situation. Could you please advise me on a suitable alternative that would give better‑quality masters and allow me to make better‑sounding copies?
My equipment list includes a Roland XP50 keyboard, Tascam 424 MkII Portastudio and a Tascam M106 mixer. Should I be looking at a DAT machine or some kind of CD mastering? Also, could I record from my Roland keyboard directly to DAT or CD? A lot of the music I record is instrumental, but I also record acoustic guitar and vocal pieces as well.
Jim Holland
Assistant Editors Tom Flint and Debbie Poyser reply: Mastering to CD or DAT will certainly improve the situation. We'd also suggest that you consider investing in a stereo compressor, from someone like Drawmer, Dbx or Alesis, if you don't already have one, to improve the level at which you can master. If you can get the signal as loud as possible (without distortion), noise will be less of a problem and your mixes will also sound more polished and professional. The Philips CDR775 dual CD recorder (under £300 in the UK; SRTL, +44 (0)1243 379834) which was reviewed in the December 2000 SOS, is worth looking at for mastering. It has one CDRW deck and one CDplayer deck, which is capable of playing back un‑finalised CDRW discs, unlike normal domestic CD players. You can thus not only master to it, but also run off CD copies of your master, at double speed.
That said, cassette mastering may not be as much of a problem as you think, if you can get the source material as high‑quality as possible. Your recordings will still only be as good as the weakest link in your recording chain, and in this case it's probably your cassette Portastudio. You could consider buying a recorder with better preamps and a superior signal‑to‑noise ratio, perhaps one of the new digital personal studios. Almost all of these have built‑in mixers and a digital output for recording directly to CD or DAT.
You could certainly record direct to the mastering medium of your choice directly from your XP50, and this should result in excellent quality for synth instrumentals, especially if you're mastering to CD or DAT, but it wouldn't, obviously, allow you to work with acoustic instruments or vocals.