The Sound Design Diaries #5: My "new" Portastudio
< BackIn 2014 I stumbled upon an interview with one of my favourite musicians, Alessandro Cortini, who at the time was working with Nine Inch Nails. As a way of performing pre-recorded material live, Alessandro was using an old Tascam Portastudio 414 mkII, which I remembered from my teenage years. More specifically, I remember not being able to afford one!
Alessandro Cortini was using the cassette as a medium of expression
Alessandro was using the cassette as a medium of expression, slowing down and speeding up the pre-recorded synths, creating wonderfully drifting, unstable soundscapes. He was performing with an obsolete multitrack recorder. I had to have one! A few years later Reverb did a very similar interview, linked below.
Alessandro Cortini and his Portastudio
Scouting the Second-hand market
I started scouting the second-hand market: with the advent of digital audio and laptops, I was sure I could find one of these treasures for next to nothing. I was very wrong! Everybody had the same idea and Portastudios were suddenly very expensive. After years of thinking about it, I recently found one on eBay and its incredibly poor condition meant I could offer a very low price and win the auction.
Not in great condition
It is a bulky piece of hardware, it looks beautiful in its grey-blueish plastic enclosure and there is absolutely nothing “Porta”(-ble) about it, certainly not by today’s standards.
Its appearance screams 1990s/early 2000s. The previous owner(s) put hideous stickers on the unit, which were removed with varying degrees of success. One that says “Neil Sharman” (hey Neil, if you used to own a 414 mkII, now I have it!) left a mark and the name can still be deciphered. Most importantly, the back panel has a huge burn that caused the plastic to melt, apparently because of “contact with an oil lamp”, which is… an interesting explanation. The owner also packed the wrong power supply with the unit (which was at least the right polarity, so nothing was burned when I plugged it in before realising), a 9-volt brick. Luckily, I keep a box with hundreds (well maybe not hundreds but they feel like hundreds) of old PSUs of all voltages, and I found a replacement right away. As I turn it on, the first auditory impression is not pretty: it sounds more like the fan blades/helicopter rotor in the opening sequence to Apocalypse Now than the heartwarming mechanical spinning accompanied by a subtle hiss that I had hoped for. Something is clearly wrong, and I’ll have to get it fixed.
Retro sound
As a first experiment, before even trying to put a cassette in it, I start plugging in a couple of my synthesizers and drum machines and sending various signals from my computer to the unit inputs. The preamplifiers distort in a wonderful, organic way when pushed to higher gain levels so if nothing else works I will at least be able to use this as a distortion unit. The other thing I fell in love with right away is the EQ section: it is a two-band circuit and after some research I learn that the centre frequencies are 100Hz and 10kHz with +-10dB gain. It doesn’t offer any sort of surgical control of course but looking at them more like filters than tone-fixing EQs, the appeal is obvious and I suspect the Highs knob will allow me to bring out some beloved tape hiss.
If you want to have a listen to some of my music performed on Portastudio, here's my album Solar performed live at Wavetable in Edinburgh.
- Tagged:
- Music
- Sound Design
