SOUND ON SOUND

[hijosh]

When I finally got my first "proper" recorder, (digital 12-track), that synced with my sequencer, it was *amazing*...

Which one was it?

Akai DPS12. The only one prior to that was Roland's VS880, which was 8 tracks *compressed* audio. The DPS12 was uncompressed audio, 12 tracks, and I could sync/control it via Logic... I saw the news piece in SOS about it, new it was the ideal thing for me, and then trundled up to London to go get one...

(And yes, I had to go back to Akai when all the Jazz drives started dying and were recalled...)

Desmond, I have an old Akai DPS12 that I've been trying to control with Logic but they're having trouble talking to each other. Any chance we could connect over email so I could learn how you made it work?

[Daddyo]

Hope I'm not injudiciously reviving a necro thread here. I'm a near-ancient musician/ producer, and was a user of the original Portastudio way back in the day. l went on to a reasonably long career in production, then on into IT for a good long spell, and am now happily entering retirement.

So I've slowly, over the years, by accretion, built a reasonably capable production environment at home. The philosophy at the heart of the design of this environment has been to arrive at a comfortable mix of the old and the new.

I think the draw of some of the older equipment, from the musician's perspective, has been the sense of immediate access to recording it provides: as an extension to playing, and more importantly, as an extension to writing.

There's recent and current equipment that can scratch that itch. The Tascam Model 12 comes to mind. l keep one on a small cart, along with a Kemper. A USB connection to a laptop provides wireless access to a shared storage environment. From there, l can pick up any ideas and move them into a DAW for further development and finishing.

Having easy, ready access to a multitrack environment was an extremely compelling capability in the late '70s and early '80s, especially as a musician and producer. It stimulated a lot of creative work.

Now in early retirement, I'm finding the time to retrieve some of those spontaneously created scratch tracks and take the next steps with them. New ideas spring up as well.

At the heart of this is ease of transport between environments. It is amazing what's become easy today. This gives us a platform that would have been out of our wildest dreams in those old days.

These are great days to be still kicking!

[desmond]

Desmond, I have an old Akai DPS12 that I've been trying to control with Logic but they're having trouble talking to each other. Any chance we could connect over email so I could learn how you made it work?

Sorry, didn't see this. No, I'm not doing personal email tech support, but you could always create a thread here if you're stuck with something, it's what this community is for.

As far as I remember that far back, I had the DPS12 as the master, sending MTC to Logic running on the Atari ST, and had Logic sending MMC commands to the DPS12, so when you press play in Logic, it starts the DPS12 playing, which sends MTC to Logic to start it playing.

Then I could write volume/pan automation with MIDI CC's. I think I also had some environment stuff going on, but I'd have to dig out old projects to refresh my memory...

[hijosh]

Desmond, I have an old Akai DPS12 that I've been trying to control with Logic but they're having trouble talking to each other. Any chance we could connect over email so I could learn how you made it work?

Sorry, didn't see this. No, I'm not doing personal email tech support, but you could always create a thread here if you're stuck with something, it's what this community is for.

As far as I remember that far back, I had the DPS12 as the master, sending MTC to Logic running on the Atari ST, and had Logic sending MMC commands to the DPS12, so when you press play in Logic, it starts the DPS12 playing, which sends MTC to Logic to start it playing.

Then I could write volume/pan automation with MIDI CC's. I think I also had some environment stuff going on, but I'd have to dig out old projects to refresh my memory...

Thanks, Desmond. Being able to press play in Logic to start playback on the DPS12 is exactly what I'm trying to do -- I just can't seem to get them to recognize each other. I'll start a new thread to troubleshoot.