Marantz 4 track

GroupDIY Audio Forum

Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

redear

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 6, 2006
Messages
58
I have an old 4 track (Merantz PMD740), decent for its age but I now am looking at high end PT stuff and am wondering if you guys have some DIY ideas for the 4 track. Some ideas I have had are a tape delay and useing the EQ (not sure the quality is that great on it for stand along but I want to use it for something...) I am fairly handy with the DIY stuff so have no fear.
Thanks,
Seth
 
oh man, i have a pmd 740 (or 760--the one with the digital counter and VU's that change from green to red when in record). i used to love the thing. i'll probably never get rid of it. then again, i'll probably never use it again either. i always felt that the pre's in it sounded great on drums, and the EQ was cool in a gritty kind of way. i'll be following your thread, but unfortunately i can't help except for the inadvertant bump.
 
Same situation here, not doing much with it but since it's still a nice unit and since it won't fetch much I expect it simply stays. I have the '740 as well, the one with the counter, handy looping & changing meter-lighting. I've never heard of a '760.

FWIW, its mic-pre's are opamp-only, '2068 I thought without any discretes in front - this was before all those budget mixers with discretes+opamp came around.

Imho & given the circumstances, that weird combination of DBX noise reduction, Dolby HXpro & double cassette speed didn't sound bad at all !

FWIW, I recall having a transfer from a demo studio-master both to the PMD740 and a DAT and preferred the analog version.

Bye,

Peter
 
[quote author="redear"]I have an old 4 track (Merantz PMD740), decent for its age but I now am looking at high end PT stuff and am wondering if you guys have some DIY ideas for the 4 track. Some ideas I have had are a tape delay and useing the EQ (not sure the quality is that great on it for stand along but I want to use it for something...) I am fairly handy with the DIY stuff so have no fear.[/quote]

Does the PMD have 2 heads or 3? That makes a big difference in how you can tie it into another (in your case, digital) system. One head is always just an erase head, but then you've got either seperate play and record heads, or one combo play/record head. I don't know if I've ever seen a 4 track with 3 heads, but they could exist. Mutitrack machines with three heads actually have a playback head and a combo head, aka sel-sync, so you can monitor in sync while overdubbing.

Anyway, if you do have three heads, you can send a signal out your DAW to the tape machine, and then return the signal, monitoring off "tape" (instead of "source"). This creates a short delay, in the slapback range if you can run the tape at 1 7/8 ips. I've also used this for tape saturation effects - bounce the signal out to tape and back on a seperate track in the DAW, then nudge the bounced signal back until it lines up with the original tracks. Depending on how hard you hit the tape, this can result in gnarly distortion, or more subtle saturation and peak limiting. Very helpful, I've found, for adding some thickness to drums recorded directly into a DAW.

Cheers,
Leigh
 
[quote author="clintrubber"]Just two heads in total I'm afraid...[/quote]

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.

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.

On that note, I would definitely try tracking drums without dbx NR, as the dbx compress/expand process can add weird pumping to drum tracks in particular. If the drum parts are soft/brushed, you might want dbx on there, but for loud, rock drumming perhaps not.

Leigh
 
[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
 
[quote author="clintrubber"]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.[/quote]

Yeah, I've thought about that. Ghetto as all get out, but if it works....

Here's another thought: put your guide track on a CD, and use both DCC players to record to get 4 tracks. The clocking should be tight enough for a few minute song, right? There might be a slight phase issue developing after a couple minutes, make sure to listen for that. If so, it might not sound very good unless everything's really close miked (to minimize bleed and thereby inter-track phase issues). Definitely if you're doing a stereo pair (say, of overheads) put those on the same recorder, but that's pretty intuitive anyway.

Cheers,
Leigh
 
[quote author="leigh"][quote author="clintrubber"]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.[/quote]

Yeah, I've thought about that. Ghetto as all get out, but if it works....

Here's another thought: put your guide track on a CD, and use both DCC players to record to get 4 tracks. The clocking should be tight enough for a few minute song, right? There might be a slight phase issue developing after a couple minutes, make sure to listen for that. If so, it might not sound very good unless everything's really close miked (to minimize bleed and thereby inter-track phase issues). Definitely if you're doing a stereo pair (say, of overheads) put those on the same recorder, but that's pretty intuitive anyway.

Cheers,
Leigh[/quote]

Nice idea to extend that to a CD-player :thumb: Should indeed work as well.

Before I bought that Roland multi I've done the multiple recording DCCs. To test I dragged the various recorders (can you tell I work for...) into one room and checked for timing differences. IIRIC I checked for 3 & 30 minute sections (doing the dishes meanwhile :wink: ) I checked for differences between recorders and also checked for variations if I re-ran the same recorder another time.

The results were good but not stellar though. It'd definitely have required some DAW-manipulation (apart from positioning), even for 3 minute sections. The results would have been in comb-filtering territory though, not in the drummer ending a song five seconds after the other players.

The two DCC-thing I've been doing was indeed for shorter sections, short loops etc. For complete songs I felt I should not make life too difficult with aligning hassle of various DCC-machines so I went for that Roland.
Timing is perfect for that Roland between tracks of course. For transfers from/to DAW it's about perfect as well (they're synced), despite only being able to transfer 2 tracks at a time. (no RPC-1 :evil: )

Bye,

Peter
 

Latest posts

Back
Top