1980s Home Studio
What Would You Find In An '80s Home Studio? I started my recording career with a Studer 24-track in a pro studio, but I did my fair share of home and project studio recording, too. In my experience, a typical mid-to-late '80s home studio would be based around a multitrack tape machine - quarter-inch eight-track, half-inch eight-track or half-inch 16-track, according to budget. The Home Studio It was the early 1980s, setting aside that in previous years my friends and I had used things like my sister's portable stereo cassette player to record the band.
My first home "studio" was a 4 track cassette circa the mid 80's. I graduated to 1/2" 8 track. Sometimes it got synched with a DA88 to for 15 tracks (because you'd lose a tape track to time code).
Then I graduated to 16 track and stayed there for 5 or 6 years. The first board was an Allen & Heath System 8 and then a TAC Scorpion. Home Studio Experiences and Observations through the Decades So I want to take you for a ride through decades past and explore my personal Music Studio experiences throughout the Mid 1980's and 1990's.
This column will be a two part series. Check out our 1980s home studio selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our mugs shops. The Lie Of The Land Sound On Sound was launched in response to a revolution in project-studio music recording.
The advent of the MIDI protocol, MIDI sequencers, timecode-based synchronisers and narrow-gauge multitrack, all in the first half of the 1980s, meant it was becoming practical for hobbyist musicians to create complete tracks. Recreating The '80s Home Studio Experience Sound on Sound published a great article on Recreating The '80s Home Studio Experience that had me reminiscing. I came along later, but in the late-'90s we used a lot of similar tricks, and I would have loved to have had access to some of the tools they used in the article.
The latest retro revival is all about the live-out-loud '80s, when decor extremes were extremely cool. Designers are revisiting the decade's greatest hits. The sounds of the 1980s are based in the sounds of the 1970s, with newer technology coming to the market place and to the studios, or obscure technology gaining more acceptance.
Families gathered around giant wooden TV cabinets and everyone had a landline with a tangled cord. This was a time before minimalist décor and smart homes, when microwaves were massive and everything smelled a little like aerosol hairspray. Here's a nostalgic list of 30 things that made 1980s American homes feel like, well, home.