Tascam Porta02 MiniStudio Owner's Manual

Contents

Tascam Porta02 MiniStudio Owner's Manual Manual pdf 20 page image

4 Hints and advanced tips204 – Hints and advanced tipsThis section gives a few hints and tipswhich may be useful to you when youmake recordings using the Porta02.4.1 Recording techniquesLearning how to record is an art, not ascience. One of the best teachers is expe-rience. However, there are a few thingsmentioned here which may be useful toyou, and there are several good books onthe subject which can explain the theoryof recording and some of the techniques.4.1.1 Recording electric guitarsMuch of the sound of an electric guitar(and also bass) is due to the effects,amplifier and speakers, as well as the gui-tar and style of playing. If you plug theguitar straight into the Porta02, you will,of course, be able to record it, but thesound will probably not be what you areused to.Plugging effects units between the guitarand the Porta02 will certainly help to pro-duce a fuller sound. The sound whichwill come closest to a live sound, though,will be provided by the amplifier itself.You can adopt one of two approaches:either to put a microphone in front of theguitar speaker and record this (at MIClevel), or to connect the output of the pre-.amplifier to the Porta02 and record atLINE level.4.1.2 Recording with effectsProfessional recordings often use effectslike digital reverberation on vocals, etc.You can add some of these effects byplugging the microphone into an effectsunit, and plugging the unit into thePorta02. Note that the effects unit mustbe able to accept microphone-level sig-nals, and will output to the Porta02 atLINE levels.In addition, you will need to use the inter-nal balance control in the unit to decidehow much of the “dry” (un-effected)sound will be passed through to thePorta02 for recording.If you do not have access to a reverbera-tion unit, you can try recording vocals ina very “live” room (without much furni-ture).WARNINGDo not connect the speaker output (or head-phone output, if provided) of the amplifier tothe Porta02. This will almost certainly dam-age the Porta02, and may damage the ampli-fier. Only use outputs which are markedLINE OUT, PRE OUT, DIRECT OUTand so on. Avoid using any outputs markedSPEAKER OUT, SP OUT, 4Ω, 8Ω, 16Ωor the like.