Old timers - Tascam 234 anyone?

[graveleye]

hey guys, I recently found a very old tape I made on a Tascam 234 (4 track cassette) about 30 years ago. Only problem is, I do not have a Tascam 234 and don't really want to buy one to dub off one tape. Does anyone have one of these machines that can transfer the tape to PT for me? I can probably pay or trade services depending. This is a special recording to me but the only mixes left were made on the fly not long after it was recorded and I would like to properly archive these songs. It's probably pretty terrible, but you would only have to hear it once and it's only about 25 minutes of material!!

Can ya help out an old guy?

Also here I have a Tascam 238 (8 track cassette) and a Tascam 38 (8 track 1/2" reel to reel) if anyone has a similar old project they would like to dub into PT.

[Carl Kolchak]

If you can be bothered to manually sync it up, you can use a regular cassette player, and lay one side of the tape into Pro Tools, then flip the cassette over and do the other side.

You'll then have to use Audio Suite to reverse two of the tracks, and then Varispeed all 4 tracks as a group, to bring them up to pitch.

Then you have to manually sync the two transfer passes, correcting any drift as you go.

It's tedious, and you may not have absolutely perfect frequency response, due to the difference in the speeds that the material was originally recorded at, and that it gets played in to Pro Tools, but it's a workable solution if you have no other option.

Did the 234 even have direct outs, or was it stereo out + 1 mono tape cue?

Even then you'd have to transfer in 2 passes, and re sync - but at least you could use say the drum track as a reference to sync to.

Good luck!


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[graveleye]

That's a pretty interesting concept. I'm not sure if it will work, but worth a try for the fun of it anyway.

The 234 has 4 ins and 4 outs, but if I can't find a machine it doesn't matter. I've tried it on my tascam 238 and an old Yamaha 4 track I have but the heads don't line up right.

Thanks for the reply!

[Barry Johns]

Originally Posted by graveleye

hey guys, I recently found a very old tape I made on a Tascam 234 (4 track cassette) about 30 years ago. Only problem is, I do not have a Tascam 234 and don't really want to buy one to dub off one tape. Does anyone have one of these machines that can transfer the tape to PT for me? I can probably pay or trade services depending. This is a special recording to me but the only mixes left were made on the fly not long after it was recorded and I would like to properly archive these songs. It's probably pretty terrible, but you would only have to hear it once and it's only about 25 minutes of material!!

Can ya help out an old guy?

Also here I have a Tascam 238 (8 track cassette) and a Tascam 38 (8 track 1/2" reel to reel) if anyone has a similar old project they would like to dub into PT.

I have a 4 track, of you want to send it to me, I can give it a try. I bought for the sole reason of importing my old 4-track material into Protools.

[mjslakeridge]

I would be interested to see how this turns out. If you mail the cassette to Barry, you should first do what Carl recommended. In the event the tape gets lost, you will still have something to work with.

I did a project a few years ago, transferring a box full of 2&1/2 inch (I think that was the size) reel to reel tapes into Protools. Those tapes were sent back and forth to Vietnam during the war by my friend's grandfather who was stationed there. A little eq and compression and the project turned out pretty well. Those were mono recordings, so nothing to re-align.

[graveleye]

OK this is the weirdest thing. I have a Yamaha 4 track and decided to see if it would work and it did. Oddly, like 15 years ago I tried it and it seemed like the tape heads were different than the Tascam 234 so nothing played right. For some reason it is working now. I'm wondering if I may have been thinking about another tape? Either way I feel stupid on one hand, because I've had this tape for nearly 30 years and didn't do anything with it because for some reason I got it in my head that it wouldn't play on the Yamaha. On the other hand, I'm happy to get to hear this stuff again... good heavens it's horrible too, in a wonderful 4-track ping-ponged way. You guys probably should be glad to not have this tape subjected on your ears lol

I'm an archivist and I really don't know why. I guess because my lifes work with music is pretty much all I have to show for my oxygen habit. I have multitrack tapes going back to the early 80s in several formats from cassette to 1/4" r2r to 1/2" r2r. Most of it is on PT now, but that one tape.

I've done some tape baking and all, but once I got all my stuff transferred I got out of it. There isn't much market for these transfers, but I did wind up with a couple of cool reel to reel machines to play with.

[mjslakeridge]

Glad you got it to work! Back before CD's, whenever I would buy a new vinyl album, on the first playing of it I would record it to a TEAC A-2300S (which I still have, and assume still works). It records at 7 1/2 and 15 ips. Back then you could get some pretty decent 7" 1/4 tape at Radio Shack. I could get one album per "side" of the tape. Then when I wanted to listen to an album, I would generally listen to the tape. Still have dozens of them around here somewhere.

Then in the early 2000's I got my first DAW, a Roland VS-1680, so I recorded all my tapes and old vinyl into the 1680 and burned CDs. Took many months to convert several hundred albums. Then, later on I ripped all of the CDs into MP3 files on my computer.