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This article is close, but IMHO, misses the real killer feature. The no-screen makes a big difference, but the real one is: There is no undo! I have listened t

This article is close, but IMHO, misses the real killer feature. The no-screen makes a big difference, but the real one is: There is no undo! I have listened to a number of very good producers talking about how a 4 track reel to reel (the higher-fi equivalent) was a game changing addition to their workflow because of this. With a modern DAW, one is faced with decision paralaysis, the capability of layer forever, and ability to tweak for ever. With a four track reel-to-reel, you need to make decisions way earlier, you can't just keep adding tracks (the noise floor grows), and you get shit done. Like Sgt. Pepper's. That said, I have not personally been brave enough to do this. It would probably be very good for me, ha!

driggs 3y ago
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded despite the limitation of 4-track recorders, most certainly not because of it! They used as many as three individual Studer J37 4-track recorders with 1" tape, bouncing tracks across machines, and preserving the original generation tapes so they could bounce down again without cumulative noise. And, for "A Day in the Life", they synchronized two 4-track machines together with a 50Hz control signal so they could record all of the orchestral parts. But sure, for bedroom musicians who aren't The Beatles, forced limitations can be freeing!
- iainctduncan 3y ago
  Right, I know that from the fantastic book, "Good Vibrations." But note that none of it provided an "undo", which was my point. Great read btw, if you're into that sort of thing!
  - timc3 3y ago
    Except it did provide it in a pro studio session. They could drop in and out, overdub and cut and splice tape if they wanted. But your original point of not having an undo being liberating is IMHO correct.
    - whstl 3y ago
      Well, if you punch in over a track that already has content you are deleting previous content via the eraser head, so there's no undo for that. Unless you have "backup", which is obviously a second generation recording. If you "fix it in an overdub", then maybe but it makes mixing more difficult. Or you gotta do a bounce which is, once again, second generation. Of course something being second generation is not the worst thing in the world, but if you bounce a lot, noise and distortion will creep in.
    - iainctduncan 3y ago
      Not the same at all as undo. Fwiw I've done sessions both ways, totally different mental effect. Like, completely different.
- iainctduncan 3y ago
  And the people I'm referring to were not bedroom musicians. I mean folks like Jamie Lidell.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  It doesn't have to be so binary. It can he both, or a spectrum. They had an aural vision. They also had limitations (i.e., only four tracks). But that's what artists [1] do...They challenge limitations. They challenge expectations. They bread down barriers. They see scarcity as a feature, not a bug. Where others cowered at the confinements of the medium, The Beatles, George Martin, Geoff Emerick (engineer), and Ken Townsend (technical engineer) rolled up their sleeves and when to work. Overcoming the medium was part of the challenge. That albatross contributed to the creativity, ingenuity and innovation. It's was part of the problem *and* the resulting solution. [1] I'm using the text book definition of artist. Today mear pop stars are given credit for being artists. Nah. They don't technically qualify but their publicist, manager and label probably believe it's good for PR, as well as the overly fragile pop star ego.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Have a look at how Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart produced the very first version of 'Sweet Dreams'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Dreams_(Are_Made_of_This) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Dreams_(Are_Made_of_This... It's amazing they got out of that gear what they did and I'm pretty sure that in their case it's exactly like the last line in your comment. And it still rocks.
varispeed 3y ago
> but the real one is: There is no undo! The undo sort of exists - it means you have to simply record the part again. This has two effects: a) it makes you play / practice more, so what you record gets better over time b) if you make a mistake you may be more keen to keep it rather than record again - which leads to the recorded stuff having more character and spice.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
A perfect example of how scarcity drives innovation / creativity. Pardon the use of cliche but...The limitations of the box force you to think and act outside the box.
adamors 3y ago
> The cost, of course, is that your mistakes get baked all the way in, for better or worse. No undo buttons here. You have to move slowly and skillfully to find success. From the article, so it points out this feature exactly.
fassssst 3y ago
Consider an OP-1, same idea just more convenient and with cool synths and a radio built in :)
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
So ... there's a bit of a misconception here IMO. The way music used to be recorded "back in the day" involved (at least) two distinct groups of people: the actual musicians, and the audio engineer(s). The work of the latter before the advent of automation (which is essentially, a kind of "undo") was long an arduous, and it's easy to understand why they were so happy when mixing consoles began to have recallable settings & automation of parameters. None of this impacted the musicians' work, or barely affected it. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, you had people like Eno (and to some extent Zappa, not to mention the electro-acoustic traditions in Europe) who started to use the studio as an instrument. That is, it was precisely the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the recording and mixing technology that was the subject of a "performance". Meanwhile, the bass player played bass. If called for, they played it again. And again. And then they went home. Modern DAWs would not change this at all, were it not for two notable changes. First, the job of audio engineering has been taken over, not completely but extensively, by musicians and "producers" themselves. This means that making a piece of music now tends to include a series of decisions and processes that used to be the domain of the engineers. Secondly, the phenomenon of composing/producing "in the box" has emerged, in which there is no actual recording of any sort of instrument that exists outside of the DAW (or computer), and thus working on a musical composition now frequently means working in a DAW rather than working on whatever instrument you might have played back when Fostex was a company. Both of these things mean that the tweaking/recall/automation/editing features of a DAW, once "reserved" for audio engineers, are things that "just musicians" consider to be a part of their own toolkit.
lachlan_gray 3y ago
I think this also explains in large part the change in Steely Dan's sound in the 70s/80s vs in the 90s/00s. The significance of perfection changes entirely when you can ctrl-z. Great case in point is "The Second Arrangement": https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jun/26/the-most-important-cassette-on-the-planet-how-steely-dan-fans-uncovered-their-holy-grail https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jun/26/the-most-impor...
eschneider 3y ago
This is weirdly true. One of the reasons that I've stuck to doing a lot of my (semi-pro) photography work on film, even when the quality on digital got 'good enough' for me is that you shoot it, and you're largely done. Most of your planning and decisions are locked in when you shoot and...I kinda like that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

driggs 3y ago

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded despite the limitation of 4-track recorders, most certainly not because of it! They used as many as three individual Studer J37 4-track recorders with 1" tape, bouncing tracks across machines, and preserving the original generation tapes so they could bounce down again without cumulative noise. And, for "A Day in the Life", they synchronized two 4-track machines together with a 50Hz control signal so they could record all of the orchestral parts. But sure, for bedroom musicians who aren't The Beatles, forced limitations can be freeing!

iainctduncan 3y ago
Right, I know that from the fantastic book, "Good Vibrations." But note that none of it provided an "undo", which was my point. Great read btw, if you're into that sort of thing!
- timc3 3y ago
  Except it did provide it in a pro studio session. They could drop in and out, overdub and cut and splice tape if they wanted. But your original point of not having an undo being liberating is IMHO correct.
  - whstl 3y ago
    Well, if you punch in over a track that already has content you are deleting previous content via the eraser head, so there's no undo for that. Unless you have "backup", which is obviously a second generation recording. If you "fix it in an overdub", then maybe but it makes mixing more difficult. Or you gotta do a bounce which is, once again, second generation. Of course something being second generation is not the worst thing in the world, but if you bounce a lot, noise and distortion will creep in.
  - iainctduncan 3y ago
    Not the same at all as undo. Fwiw I've done sessions both ways, totally different mental effect. Like, completely different.
iainctduncan 3y ago
And the people I'm referring to were not bedroom musicians. I mean folks like Jamie Lidell.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
It doesn't have to be so binary. It can he both, or a spectrum. They had an aural vision. They also had limitations (i.e., only four tracks). But that's what artists [1] do...They challenge limitations. They challenge expectations. They bread down barriers. They see scarcity as a feature, not a bug. Where others cowered at the confinements of the medium, The Beatles, George Martin, Geoff Emerick (engineer), and Ken Townsend (technical engineer) rolled up their sleeves and when to work. Overcoming the medium was part of the challenge. That albatross contributed to the creativity, ingenuity and innovation. It's was part of the problem *and* the resulting solution. [1] I'm using the text book definition of artist. Today mear pop stars are given credit for being artists. Nah. They don't technically qualify but their publicist, manager and label probably believe it's good for PR, as well as the overly fragile pop star ego.
jacquesm 3y ago
Have a look at how Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart produced the very first version of 'Sweet Dreams'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Dreams_(Are_Made_of_This) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Dreams_(Are_Made_of_This... It's amazing they got out of that gear what they did and I'm pretty sure that in their case it's exactly like the last line in your comment. And it still rocks.

varispeed 3y ago

> but the real one is: There is no undo! The undo sort of exists - it means you have to simply record the part again. This has two effects: a) it makes you play / practice more, so what you record gets better over time b) if you make a mistake you may be more keen to keep it rather than record again - which leads to the recorded stuff having more character and spice.

chiefalchemist 3y ago

A perfect example of how scarcity drives innovation / creativity. Pardon the use of cliche but...The limitations of the box force you to think and act outside the box.

adamors 3y ago

> The cost, of course, is that your mistakes get baked all the way in, for better or worse. No undo buttons here. You have to move slowly and skillfully to find success. From the article, so it points out this feature exactly.

fassssst 3y ago

Consider an OP-1, same idea just more convenient and with cool synths and a radio built in :)

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

So ... there's a bit of a misconception here IMO. The way music used to be recorded "back in the day" involved (at least) two distinct groups of people: the actual musicians, and the audio engineer(s). The work of the latter before the advent of automation (which is essentially, a kind of "undo") was long an arduous, and it's easy to understand why they were so happy when mixing consoles began to have recallable settings & automation of parameters. None of this impacted the musicians' work, or barely affected it. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, you had people like Eno (and to some extent Zappa, not to mention the electro-acoustic traditions in Europe) who started to use the studio as an instrument. That is, it was precisely the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the recording and mixing technology that was the subject of a "performance". Meanwhile, the bass player played bass. If called for, they played it again. And again. And then they went home. Modern DAWs would not change this at all, were it not for two notable changes. First, the job of audio engineering has been taken over, not completely but extensively, by musicians and "producers" themselves. This means that making a piece of music now tends to include a series of decisions and processes that used to be the domain of the engineers. Secondly, the phenomenon of composing/producing "in the box" has emerged, in which there is no actual recording of any sort of instrument that exists outside of the DAW (or computer), and thus working on a musical composition now frequently means working in a DAW rather than working on whatever instrument you might have played back when Fostex was a company. Both of these things mean that the tweaking/recall/automation/editing features of a DAW, once "reserved" for audio engineers, are things that "just musicians" consider to be a part of their own toolkit.

lachlan_gray 3y ago

I think this also explains in large part the change in Steely Dan's sound in the 70s/80s vs in the 90s/00s. The significance of perfection changes entirely when you can ctrl-z. Great case in point is "The Second Arrangement": https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jun/26/the-most-important-cassette-on-the-planet-how-steely-dan-fans-uncovered-their-holy-grail https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jun/26/the-most-impor...

eschneider 3y ago

This is weirdly true. One of the reasons that I've stuck to doing a lot of my (semi-pro) photography work on film, even when the quality on digital got 'good enough' for me is that you shoot it, and you're largely done. Most of your planning and decisions are locked in when you shoot and...I kinda like that.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]