Making The Most Of An 8-track

In these days of practically unlimited MIDI sequencer tracks, just eight tape tracks can seem frustratingly few. David Mellor passes on a few tricks to help 8‑track users expand their recording horizons — including how to get 20 tracks from 8...

It's a fact of life that home recordists and project studio owners will always want more tape tracks — but just because you have a limited number of tracks available, this doesn't mean that you can't compete with the big boys who have 24‑track. The limitations of 8‑track, a common recording format, are obvious — it takes more than eight instruments to make a modern recording. But you can get around this with a little thought and planning. Having 24 tracks is a brute force answer to the problem, but 8‑track users can solve it with intelligence.

What's Wrong With 8‑Track?

These days, 8‑track recorders come in three varieties: analogue, digital and hard disk. I'm going to forget 8‑track hard disk for now, because it's very much a minority activity, although I don't think I'll be saying the same thing this time next year. Your analogue 8‑track will almost certainly be a Fostex or a Tascam, so I'll aim my comments at this type of machine. The sound quality of these recorders can be very good; I used to have a Tascam 38, and although the amount of noise it generated (it didn't have built‑in noise reduction) used to irritate me, by the time I had finished mixing, carefully fading tracks in and out as necessary, I was usually more than pleased with the result. In fact, I have just made a CD including some of the tracks I made years ago with this machine and they sound better than more recent ones I did with a Fostex E16.

What Do You Do In Your Studio?

Some people record music, others record from synthesizers and samplers! I'm sure you'll forgive my little joke, because I use my synth and sampler all the time, but there's nothing like the pleasure you get from a successful recording of an acoustic or electric instrument, or voice. There is a real difference, I feel, between a recording studio, where the main activity is capturing sound with a microphone, or the electrical signals from the audio output of a keyboard or sampler, and a MIDI studio, which in technical terms is more of a data‑processing operation until the final mix. For a recording studio, the number of tracks on the tape is a very important feature of the studio, since the more tracks it has, the more flexible it can be. The MIDI studio, on the other hand, can generate a considerable number of independent musical lines without ever going to tape until the final mix. Multitrack tape is an optional extra in this case.

Whether you have a recording or a MIDI studio, there are several different types of work you may do. You may simply want to gain experience in recording with a view to going into it professionally, and from this point of view, 8‑track is ideal, because you have to work harder to achieve a successful recording. You may want to be a songwriter and do song demos in your studio. Although publishers always want to be 'wowed' by the quality of the demo, despite what they sometimes say, if you get a really good singer and make a simple but supportive arrangement for the song, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to sell your song from a demo originally recorded on 8‑track. The simplicity of 8‑track may even allow you to put more of your energy into the song, which will give you a far better chance of success than simply having the 'best' equipment. You may be an aspiring musician or band after a recording contract; making a really good recording, from a musical rather than technical point of view, is extraordinarily difficult — even if you play well live, and an 8‑track studio will allow you to get all the recording practice you need. You can hire a pro studio to do it properly when you're ready.

Stretch Your Tracks To The Max

Not all music demands a large number of tracks. A conventional band line‑up may include drums, bass, a couple of guitars, keyboards, and a vocal. If you record drums and keyboards in stereo this adds up to eight — so no problem! Let's call it 'straight eight' recording. But when one of the guitarists suddenly says, "Oh, I do a backing vocal on this track", you're in trouble because you don't have a spare track. Real drums don't sound very good in mono (although drum machines and sampled drums can), so your first option will be to record the keyboard on one track. Although most keyboards have stereo outputs these days, they don't sound bad in mono, and often you'll find you get a better mix because now you have to think a little more about where in the stereo image the keyboard should go, rather than just panning the outputs hard left and right. Now you really have filled all eight tracks, so if there has to be an overdubbed guitar solo on another song, you're going to have to bounce.

The best way to approach 8‑track recording is to plan it carefully from the start so that all of your bounces are taken into consideration from the earliest stages. Recording doesn't always work out like this, but it's better to modify a plan than to muddle your way along all the way through. When you know in advance that you don't have enough tracks, one option is to:

• Record six basic tracks, probably without lead vocal or important solos.
• Mix them onto two tracks of the multitrack tape.
• Erase the others and record six more tracks.

This has three disadvantages. The first is that on an analogue recorder you will lose some quality, but if you have to do it, you have to do it. Many great recordings from the '60s and early '70s were done like this and technically they still stand up today. A little bit of tape hiss sometimes gives excitement to a track, and I occasionally find myself wanting to add it to my digital recordings. A more significant disadvantage is that you now have an additional mixing stage, and you have to give this 'pre‑mix' as much attention as if you were making the final mix. The third disadvantage is, of course, that once you've erased the six original tracks, you've burnt your bridges and there's no going back!

As an extension of this technique, you could:

• Record eight basic tracks.
• Mix to DAT.
• Re‑record this mix onto a fresh section of the 8‑track tape.

You can now always go back to the original tracks if you really need to, but it's more a case of giving you the feeling of security rather than anything else. Of course, you now have yet another generation of recording, but you won't lose very much in the DAT transfer. By the way, on analogue 8‑track, you shouldn't use either of the edge tracks for your stereo premix, since they are more prone to dropouts than tracks 2 to 7.

Clever Combinations

I find that, by using techniques I shall explain shortly, I don't need to go through the pre‑mix process described above and that I can get all the tracks I need by careful bouncing as I go along. When you're short of tracks and you know you're going to have to bounce, the key is to listen for combinations of instruments that you can mix easily together, and know before the recording is finished that they are going to be OK. You can usually mix backing vocals, for instance. Where a song calls for two or three backing vocals, if you record them at an early stage when there are tracks to spare, you can mix them to one track safe in the knowledge that no‑one is likely to want to come back and say, "Can you lift the middle harmony a bit?". Once in a blue moon perhaps, but no more often than that. Sometimes you'll find that there are two or three different instruments that form a natural group, and you can bounce them onto one track without feeling that you might have later regrets. What doesn't work is bouncing dissimilar instruments that have different roles in the arrangement. Trying to bounce lead guitar, rhythm guitar and bass onto one track will not work in 90% of cases — you'll nearly always want to change the balance later. Bouncing bass and drums onto two tracks in stereo isn't ideal, but it stands a good chance of working, because together they form the rhythm section of the band. When doing this type of bouncing, as well as considering the balance of the track, you have to consider the final stereo image. My imaginary band has two guitars, but you can't bounce them together because a) they will probably clash and not be individually distinguishable, and b) you will need to balance the stereo image evenly between left and right, and panning one guitar half left and one half right will help you to do this.

Extra Tracks

Everyone yearns for extra tracks, and if you own either an Alesis or Tascam modular digital multitrack, you'll probably be saving up for another one to run in sync. But for the price you pay for an extra machine, you might consider the added functionality and versatility you can get from a hard disk recording system. I use an Apple Macintosh with a Digidesign Audiomedia II card and Sound Designer and Deck software. With this combination I can get stereo and 4‑track recording, and synchronise it with my ADAT 8‑track. There are other systems that can do this, and in the near future I can see the entry price of hard disk tumbling, since the PowerMac has arrived with enhanced data processing capability as standard.

Sound Designer has been around some time and is fairly common, so it's worthwhile describing how it can record stereo audio synchronised to timecode. It can't record two tracks individually, so it is best to transfer two previously‑recorded tracks from tape. Digidesign suggest that with the Audiomedia II card, sound quality might be compromised if the timecode source isn't as stable as timecode from a digital multitrack would be, but in practice I didn't find any serious drawbacks when synchronising to a Fostex E16. Of course, with an analogue 8‑track you'll lose a track for timecode, so the hard disk system only gives you one extra track, but that 12.5% extra capacity may just make all the difference. If you use a digital multitrack, you have the option of adding an extra card to your machine (or a BRC to an ADAT) to record timecode as part of the data on the tape, so you still get the full eight audio tracks. The Fostex RD8 has this capability as standard. If I want four more tracks, I can use Deck, which doesn't synchronise so well on record, but can accept synchronised Sound Designer files, which will then play back perfectly in sync with the tape. One advantage of using something like Deck is that I can easily correct any timing inaccuracies in parts of a track on the screen of the computer.

If the ultimate in extra tracks is to get a second digital multitrack and work on 16‑track, you can always hire one, but this will cost you extra money once you go one over the eight. If you can put off hiring the extra multitrack until the mixing stage, you'll obviously save money. I did a CD's worth of recording where, once I had filled eight tracks, I did a rough mix to mono into Sound Designer, and then copied this back to a fresh tape at the same timecode location, so that I could record up to seven extra tracks. My intention initially was to hire an extra Fostex RD8 or ADAT with BRC just for mixing, since I would have two tapes with identical timecode. I might even have been able to synchronise them with standard ADAT sync, but I thought that might be pushing my luck a little. As it happened I didn't need to go this far and I was able to transfer the extra material from the additional tape into my computer. I didn't have total confidence that sync would be perfect and I did expect to have to make adjustments, but I need not have worried — sync was perfect.

The idea of using an 8‑track recorder to supplement a MIDI system is now nothing new, but I think it's worth mentioning some ideas that can be applied in such a situation. The problem with working with a MIDI sequencer is that sounds are very easily 'lost' — what was progressing well one day seems to have totally changed the next. Tape is permanent until you erase it accidentally, as long as you don't go near any powerful magnets or play with it in the bath. The other advantage of tape is that it is very portable. There is a big difference between taking a tape you've been working on into a professional studio, and taking your entire MIDI system! I've mentioned how a hard disk recorder can allow you to record 16 tracks on two tapes with only one recorder, at which point you hire a second one for mixing. You can do this with a sequencer just as easily, more easily perhaps, and then take both tapes to a pro studio for mixing.

Sell 16 And Buy 8?

Would it be a good idea to sell your analogue 16‑track and buy a digital 8‑track? Would a sensible person do this? I did it, and I'm quite content with my decision. I sold a 16‑track tape recorder which was still in very good condition, but wasn't quite satisfying me in terms of sound quality. I thought long and hard and decided that I could manage on 8‑track, and that I would be able to achieve reasonably good results, especially considering that I'm not keen on over‑complex musical arrangements. What I didn't expect was that the results would totally surpass what I had been doing before! The solidity of digital sound, in comparison with narrow‑gauge 16‑track, and the fact that you can bounce as much as you like without significant degradation, has amazed me and the people I work with. Of course I would like an extra eight tracks, but rather than buy an additional digital multitrack I'm quite happy to continue working on 8‑track until the 8‑track hard disk market settles down a bit and I can choose a suitable model, with ADAT interface of course, at my leisure. The moral of this story is that 8‑track is a viable way of working, particularly digital 8‑track, and you need not sit and pine for a 16‑track recorder to enable you to achieve the heights of your ambitions. You can do it now, on 8‑track. Why wait?