Music Recording Equipments

This Portastudio is great, and exactly what I have been looking for. I have had no problems whatsoever with it, and it has worked like a charm. As far as other people, I’m sure they have gotten bad units. It happens with all electronics. Sometimes a bad batch of units gets sent out, or one out of ten has a defect, or sometimes they fix the problems but older versions are still being sent from store inventory. Whatever the case may be, it works amazing, unless you are one of the unlucky ones who gets a defective one.

I am a heavy metal guitarist, and I use this to write my own tracks, and lay down drums and all. This works great if you want to finalize the track and burn it to a cd, but most of the time I will send it to my computer for final mastering. Why don’t I do it all through my computer, you may ask? This is hassle free, it has no lag in the sound, and I can start it up and start recording when I have an idea, rather than get my computer turned on and all set up. Plus this unit has great sound quality. Before this, I have recorded directly to my computer for a few years. I enjoy this a lot more.

The guitar effects are decent on it, and can be used by themselves without a preamp, but they do sound weak. Being a metal guitarist, the built in effects don’t quite have the sound I need, such as heavy distortion, gain, and harmonics. It does have some metal tones on it, but believe me, not what I need. It would work well for acoustic stuff though, and for some light rock. So basically I still use a preamp in front of it, even while using built in effects, putting a preamp in front of it helps immensely.

This unit is only an 8 track, and you can only record 2 tracks ata time, but this shouldn’t be a problem if you’re the only one doing all of the recording, or if you’re taking turns laying down your parts, like you should during studio recording. But if you wanted to record all 8 tracks, say as a live performance, it won’t work. I use two tracks for rhuthm guitar, two tracks for lead guitar, two more for the second lead guitar, and two more for drums. Works great in that recording aspect. If you run out of tracks, just send them to your computer (for final mastering later) and then just delete them off of the unit to make more room.

Ok, to sum it all up, here are my final thoughts on everything:

* This unit works great, whether it be used as a standalone unit or mastered on your computer,

either way it IS COMPLETELY worth it.

* Although the amp effects in this are a little weak sounding for metal, you simply just add a

preamp in front of this and it sounds great. Plus the effects for acoustic or lighter

sounding guitar work great, since you don’t need to use pinch harmonics or gain, etc.

* Works great for self recording, laying down ideas, or self creating entire tracks or albums.

I lay down my drum tracks, my rhythm tracks, then my lead tracks.

* Even though there is not a ton of final track mastering features, or barely any at all, what

it has works very nice. You CAN silence parts of tracks, such as in between where the guitar

is not being played, so you can take out all that unnecessary bad noise.

* You can hook it up to your computer and transfer all your tracks, so you can do final

mastering on your computer, back-up tracks, etc.

And most of all, it IS really easy to use. don’t let everyone else convince you otherwise. Within one single weekend, you should easily be accustomed to it and be fairly familiar with it. Within a couple days, recording really is that simple. If you use built in effects, just remember what they are, so you can dial them in in the future easily. Just to give you a run down of my everyday operation, I want you to see how easy and fast it is. I plug it in, I start it up, I create a new track, I assign the guitar input to the tracks I want it to record on, I set my effects, and I record! Then whe nswitching to different tracks, you simply deselect the current ones, and select the new ones. It’s that simple, and takes two seconds! What’s better than this, is the fact that if you had a recording session going the previous session, and saved it (always save your session or you will lose it), then upon startup, it will load your previous used session, so all you have to do is turn it on and record! That simple!

So all in all, this IS completely worth purchasing, if you plan on using it the ways that I have mentioned. It really is an amazing piece of equitment, and I have looked at many many others before deciding upon this one.

The soft case for this DP-02 is well worth checking out, as I have also wrote a review on that to help out. If you have any questions, feel free to comment, and I will respond and answer them for you to help as much as I can!
Rating: 5 / 5

So far, I am absolutely loving my new Tascam Portastudio. It does everything I need it to. That being said, I wish it had a built in metronome, which I havent found yet… and I also wish that it had a line-out for every line-in for monitoring. All in all though, a great product at a great price. Look at the feature list, it does all the things it claims and sounds great to match.

I have read some reviews which make mention of a “whining” or “high-pitched” sound coming from the internal hard-drive but I have not heard any of this, not while playing, not while recording, not while playing back. A+ product. Perfect for beginners looking to do a little recording and pros that want a rig to practice/write on.
Rating: 5 / 5

Let me start with product quality -the unit appears to be well made, and has the weight and feel of a well designed and constructed machine. The sliders are solid, smooth, and there is no “mixer noise” during recording. The unit is advertised as intuitive -not so much, the physical layout is clean, easy to read, intuitive and straight forward. But, the instruction manual is an insult to anyone who can read; it lacks logic -operationally and sequentially, plus the manual mixes the DP-02 (CD Version) with the DP-02CF (mem card version). This gets to be VERY confusing.

I’m a classical musician, so sound quality is imperative, and this unit does a very nice job of giving back what is recorded. The mics need to be of HIGH quality for this to occur, but you should have these for all acoustic recording. It is best to use phantom power, not the battery power of many XLR mics. Even with phantom, you gotta push the gain to get anything to record from mics.

I purchased TASCAM’s Portastudio DP-02 after reading reviews -obviously by techno geeks who love mixing electronic media. I struggled with the “Printed in China” manual to figure out how to record and playback the piano in my studio. TASCAM has apparently figured out how to make a relatively simple procedure sufficiently complex to make their product nearly inoperable out of the box. To make recording even more of a hassle, try calling “Customer Support.” I called Tascam five times, 42 minutes of long distance toll calls, I was put on hold every time, and hung up after 8, and 10 minutes wait times -listening to their recorded announcement about customer service. There’s no support at TASCAM…customer support is a delusion.

My votes: HIGH for the unit, LOW for Tascam Customer service.

Rating: 4 / 5