My First Tascam 388 Song

Is this the coolest Tape Recorder of all time?

After quite an adventure, I finally take the tascam 388 for a spin and record a song.


My First time multi track recording on the Tascam 388 Studio 8 Reel to Reel recorder machine. I was messing around to see if the machine worked and what kind of sounds I could get.

I bought this guy on craigslist and it had a lot of issues, some of which I'm still working on. Transport (Fast Forward Rewind) problems, counter issues, dead channel issues, scratchy pots, lot's of stuff. I was pretty excited once it was actually running so I just knocked out an idea real fast, which is what you see here, just for fun, please don't judge it too hard haha.

Wanna see another cool machine? Check out my Yamaha MT44. It sounds better than a tascam portastudio. It actually sounds almost as good as the tascam 388 which is pretty amazing cause the 388 uses 1/4 inch tape and the yamaha uses just regular old cassette. Anyhow back to the 388...

This is a cool reel to reel machine! I can't remember the last time I messed with reel to reel, and I have recorded to cassette a whole bunch (I have a few portastudio, tascams, and a yamaha mt44). I was surprised by how much compression I got. The overdrive was interesting too. The guitars were recorded clean, so all the drive you hear on the instruments is all right in the tascam. I think that would probably be interesting to a few of you out there, I certainly have always wondered myself if the tape plugins and emulations I was using were accurate sounding, or if they sound wack. Honestly, overdrive emulators, and amp emulators, they alway sound garbage to me. I don't know if it has to do with the even order odd order distortion thing, but that's always been my experience.

What do you think about the tones on this machine? I'm curious about your thoughts.

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