Vestax MR44 4-track tape machine

I can’t stop buying these oddball ‘hi-end’ cassette 4-track machines.  At this point, I’m up to 5 of them.  This Vestax 44 was bought ‘untested’ from ebay; it needed a power supply (which entailed adding a conventional p/s jack, since the Vestax one is super weird), but other than that it worked right away. Strange set of features, but it has zero return, DBX, and high speed, and the best part is the form factor: it’s ideally suited for my ‘desktop’ style composing station, with its shallow rackmount chassis and all i/o on the front.

I had a chance to really try it out today and make a track using it exclusively.  For this first experiment I used no DBX, and type II Maxell tape.  This is a 6-voice piece. I started with a metronome on 1, and then bounced Ac Gtr, bass, and handdrums over to 1, adding some eventide reverb; track 2 was Organelle doing a mellotron kinda thing with a lil sample of my voice, 3 is my Moeck Alto recorder thru the yamaha E1010, and 4 is my old les paul with a wha wha.

I figured what with the inevitable tape hiss I should try something old school – went for a 70s euro-horror feel.  “It was the goat all along….”

When I have a sec I’ll try another onna these with DBX and using a compressor on the instruments on the way in –  see how much diff it makes in terms of fidelity.  Pretty happy w this tho.

Click here for my earlier demo of the Yamaha MT44 4-track machine.