[quote author="leigh"][quote author="clintrubber"]Just two heads in total I'm afraid...[/quote]
One other approach that some folks have taken with integrating a 4 track and DAW is simply to start a song on the 4 track, then bounce it over to the DAW to continue with overdubs. This can be particularly helpful if you need to record drums in a different space than where your DAW lives (e.g. bedroom studio, basement/practice space drums.) And, like I mentioned above, drums is where the transient-limiting qualities of tape are most often missed.
Leigh[/quote]
W.r.t. sync, I've used my '740 often with a Tascam sync-box for track#4. That was with MIDI-only-Cub. on Atari, but would give some functionality with a present DAW as well. You lose a track of course, so as Leigh said starting on the fourtrack would be better then, unless three is enough.
I've been pondering quite a lot about this PMD740+DAW foir being able to send & receive tracks and be able to record things away from the DAW. I finally decided on a digital 8 track with which I can send tracks to & from by digital I/O. If the Marantz had been 8 tracks with the same soundquality (dream on...) it'd been another story.
Well, the bounce trick won't work, although if it's for a short enough section of a song, you could still send 4 tracks out to tape, then fly them back in and line them up by eye. It'll be in sync until the tape machine drifts enough from the DAW to be noticable.
I've never had much luck with this - becomes noticale quite quickly.
You could always stretch though, but...
Somewhat related: when I'm too lazy to take along that digital 8 track and when it's only for recording a few channels I get by with two digital stereo recorders. Right,
DCC ain't dead yet ! :thumb:
I'm playing a guide track on headphones from a portable DCC-player and record on another DCC-homedeck and fly that to DAW by S/PDIF. About perfect sync, despite both DCC-machines not seeing each other. This is of course thanks to the quartz-crystal derived precision - it'll be some orders of magnitude more precise than the 4tr-tape-fluctuations.
Bye,
Peter