Been thinking about four-track recording a lot lately. I had two Portastudio 464s; I recently gave one to a friend and he’s been using it to create some crazy shit. Now I meditate upon the four-track. OMMMM. One benefit of this exercise is that it helps keep me from thinking too hard about the red velvet cupcakes LB and Crazee Joe baked on Thursday. The cupcakes lurk deliciously in the fridge and if I dwell on them for long, I will end up eating many and everyone will be pissed at me.

Four-track cassette recording is synonymous with lo-fi, but you can make a whole album on a Portastudio without compromising fidelity. Plenty of bands have managed this; Ween and Whirlwind Heat are two examples that spring immediately to mind. (The latter mixed their four-track recordings at Tarbox, though, so I’m not sure if it counts.)

I weave Portastudio material into many of my own recordings. It’s not strictly a sonic choice, but also about selecting the takes that mean the most to me personally. I might spend years working up one song; it follows me from format to format as technology advances. If I consider a guitar solo from 1992 to be the definitive take, then that’s what ends up in the final mix. For example, “Statement Of Intent” on Skyscape’s Zetacarnosa:

The guitar solo was played by Rob Hill, as recorded on four-track cassette in the summer of ‘92. The rest of the band was tracked in 2002 and 2003. (The banter with acoustic guitar at the top and end of the song, and that quiet moment after the solo, is from a 1993 videocassette.) To me, Rob’s solo summed up the time in which the song was written, and the exuberant energy which propelled us in lieu of the chops we hadn’t yet developed. No listener need know or care about any of that, but it makes the finished product more satisfying for me.

Zetacarnosa was about compressing the then-15-year history of Skyscape to a single point, so the emphasis was on context; it was okay for an element to retain its lo-fi grit because that would tell the listener something about it. The result is a superdense hi-fi/lo-fi hybrid where the Portastudio almost serves as an effect. The sound is colored, but it’s all there.

On the other hand, when the point is just to make a great-sounding track, a skilled mix engineer can work wonders with even the murkiest raw material. Andrew Weiss managed this with those classic Ween records; Dave Fridmann with the Whirlwind Heat stuff. Here’s what Tony Doogan was able to do with “Let Go”, which was recorded mostly on an eight-track Portastudio:

Everything but the piano, bass and guitar is from the eight-track cassette. Technically, each of these waveforms was squeezed into a smaller space – containing less information – than if it had been recorded on a four-track, since the width of the tape is doubly subdivided to fit twice as many tracks. Yet you’d never be able to tell which sounds came from the cassette, and which were recorded digitally; Tony sculpted the material into a hi-fi whole.

There was a time when the cassette Portastudio was the key to the recording kingdom for thousands of teenagers. It was affordable magic – you could at last let out the music in your head, arranged almost exactly the way you heard it. In mass application, though, the machine eventually became its own built-in excuse: if your music was shitty, you could blame it on the small number of tracks or the poor recording quality. It’s one reason why there were so many awful fuckin bands in the ’90s, bands whose lazy approach unfortunately continues to inspire people who should not bother making music today.

Anyway… I’m thinking about busting out my old 464 and tracking some shit. One thing I’m curious about is what it would sound like to bring a Portastudio to a real studio and use it with great mics and outboard gear. Would the result be a mess? A waste of time? Or would it realize the ultimate dream of every suburban songwriter circa 1991?

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