Recording - August 2011 - 20

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

There’s a lot to like in Korg’s new portable recorder, the Sound on Sound Unlimited Track Recorder, but to appreciate it a bit better, let me start you off with a little history lesson. Sound-on-sound recording is a time-honored technique that’s been used extensively in both the analog and digital eras, with advances in technology making it easier and cleaner over the years. It’s true, other recording platforms came along that pushed it out of the limelight, but the idea has never fully gone away, and in this little box, it picks up a 21st-Century polish. Why sound on sound? In the 1950s, a guitarist named Les Paul (you may have heard of him) came up with

Korg
Sound on Sound Unlimited Track Recorder
A sexy new twist to an age-old recording technique
a neat trick while messing around with reel-to-reel tape recorders. By adding an extra playback head to a tape recorder, he figured out a way to simultaneously play back previously recorded music and record new music onto the same piece of tape, so many passes of audio could be built up on one tape reel. You couldn’t edit or punch, but you could—for the first time—capture multiple performances on a recording medium rather than having to play everything in one pass. This innovation was called “sound on sound”. Once the idea of sound-on-sound recording was in place, it became possible to do it without knowing how to add a new head to a tape deck; all you needed was two ordinary tape recorders and even a rudimentary mixer, and use one tape deck to play back what you’d already recorded while combining it with new material you played live, recording the results onto the second deck. Swap tapes, repeat forever... or at least until the buildup of noise got too horrible. If this sounds like a lot of hassle, remember that good-quality multitracks that a regular Joe could afford didn’t really spring up until the late 1970s; there was a long period where it was much easier to afford two mono or stereo tape machines than to afford
20
RECORDING AUGUST 2011

one 4-track, so sound on sound was the way to go. Besides, even the earliest multitracks were generally used in a similar fashion, constantly bouncing down performances onto one or more tracks... it would be a long time before “every instrument lives on its own track right up until we mix” was the norm. Decades later, as digital recording became all the rage, Sony released a little box called the PCM-F1, a standalone A/D and D/A converter designed to be hooked up to a videotape recorder as a storage medium. It didn’t record on the audio tracks of the videotape—it actually striped 16-bit/44.1 kHz digital audio onto the tape in place of a picture. It was originally designed as a portable sound capture system for use with 3/4" U-Matic or 1/2" Betamax tapes, but as more affordable PCM-Series models for home use came out, some astute recording enthusiasts realized that these boxes were the key to affordable digital “multitrack” recording. The secret? Sound on sound! You hooked up two videotape machines to the PCM-F1, one to the A/D side for recording and one to the D/A side for playback, and swapped tapes back and forth. You could make a pristine (for the period) 16bit recording, then overdub another pass onto it, ad infinitum, and you were only

limited by the inherent noise of your recording system. This system didn’t have the ability to punch or spot erase, but it was digital recording, by golly! I still have my Sony PCM-501ES, and I happily recorded many songs and a couple of whole albums this way before I could afford a “real” digital multitrack. Sound-on-sound recording required a certain discipline that was (and is) a lovely hybrid of the “get it in one pass” urgency and liveness of direct-to-master recording, and the “we can add more if we want” flexibility of multitrack. Each pass had to be perfect as it was played, but a succession of perfect passes could be layered into a pretty amazing final result with very high audio quality. The digital version had other benefits; since videotapes were fairly cheap, you could make safety copies of intermediate passes, allowing you to go back and redo mistakes you didn’t spot immediately without having to scrap the entire performance and start over. Fast forward 20 years, and we have affordable digital multitracking with an infinite number of tracks, tools for fine editing and correction... has sound-onsound recording gone the way of the dinosaur? Not at all—just ask any musician who works with a looping pedal to



Recording - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2011

Recording - August 2011
Fade In
Contents
Talkback
Fast Forward
Education—What’s On Your Mind?
Korg Sound On Sound Unlimited Track Recorder
For Your Bookshelf: Time To Get Wise
For Your Bookshelf: Quick Takes
Slate Pro Audio Dragon Dynamics Processor
Shure Beta 91A, Beta 98A, and Beta 181 Microphones
For Your e-Bookshelf
Course Technology PTR Ableton Live 8 Course Clips Master
Superscope PSD430
FaderPro Are You Able?
It’s Your Music—Know Your Rights. Chapter 17: Composing Music For Motion Pictures
Universal Audio UAD-2 Satellite and Studer A800 and Lexicon 224 plug-ins
iOS Music Tools For Education
Readers' Tapes
Advertiser Index
Fade Out
Recording - August 2011 - Recording - August 2011
Recording - August 2011 - Cover2
Recording - August 2011 - 1
Recording - August 2011 - Fade In
Recording - August 2011 - 3
Recording - August 2011 - Contents
Recording - August 2011 - 5
Recording - August 2011 - Talkback
Recording - August 2011 - 7
Recording - August 2011 - Fast Forward
Recording - August 2011 - 9
Recording - August 2011 - Education—What’s On Your Mind?
Recording - August 2011 - 11
Recording - August 2011 - 12
Recording - August 2011 - 13
Recording - August 2011 - 14
Recording - August 2011 - 15
Recording - August 2011 - 16
Recording - August 2011 - 17
Recording - August 2011 - 18
Recording - August 2011 - 19
Recording - August 2011 - Korg Sound On Sound Unlimited Track Recorder
Recording - August 2011 - 21
Recording - August 2011 - For Your Bookshelf: Time To Get Wise
Recording - August 2011 - 23
Recording - August 2011 - 24
Recording - August 2011 - 25
Recording - August 2011 - 26
Recording - August 2011 - 27
Recording - August 2011 - 28
Recording - August 2011 - 29
Recording - August 2011 - For Your Bookshelf: Quick Takes
Recording - August 2011 - 31
Recording - August 2011 - Slate Pro Audio Dragon Dynamics Processor
Recording - August 2011 - 33
Recording - August 2011 - 34
Recording - August 2011 - 35
Recording - August 2011 - Shure Beta 91A, Beta 98A, and Beta 181 Microphones
Recording - August 2011 - 37
Recording - August 2011 - 38
Recording - August 2011 - 39
Recording - August 2011 - For Your e-Bookshelf
Recording - August 2011 - 41
Recording - August 2011 - Course Technology PTR Ableton Live 8 Course Clips Master
Recording - August 2011 - 43
Recording - August 2011 - Superscope PSD430
Recording - August 2011 - 45
Recording - August 2011 - FaderPro Are You Able?
Recording - August 2011 - 47
Recording - August 2011 - It’s Your Music—Know Your Rights. Chapter 17: Composing Music For Motion Pictures
Recording - August 2011 - 49
Recording - August 2011 - 50
Recording - August 2011 - 51
Recording - August 2011 - 52
Recording - August 2011 - 53
Recording - August 2011 - 54
Recording - August 2011 - 55
Recording - August 2011 - Universal Audio UAD-2 Satellite and Studer A800 and Lexicon 224 plug-ins
Recording - August 2011 - 57
Recording - August 2011 - 58
Recording - August 2011 - 59
Recording - August 2011 - iOS Music Tools For Education
Recording - August 2011 - 61
Recording - August 2011 - 62
Recording - August 2011 - 63
Recording - August 2011 - Readers' Tapes
Recording - August 2011 - Advertiser Index
Recording - August 2011 - 66
Recording - August 2011 - 67
Recording - August 2011 - 68
Recording - August 2011 - 69
Recording - August 2011 - 70
Recording - August 2011 - 71
Recording - August 2011 - Fade Out
Recording - August 2011 - Cover3
Recording - August 2011 - Cover4
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