A few years ago digital recording giant Digidesign was offering an 8-track version of Pro Tools ( a multi-track recording software platform ) as a workable demo - all for free! My guess is that it was probably downloaded by 700 billion musicians world-wide. This was long before Digidesign decided that they would fall in with Avid, and loose their edge. At the same time there was a forum related to this free down load, and it happened that my friend Martin was reading this very same forum and noticed a comment from a young musician who had decided that 8 tracks simply wasn't enough - "What am I to do with a lousy 8 tracks!" he complained. Martin, in a sudden and an altogether too infrequent stroke of brilliance responded; "
How 'bout Sgt. Peppers - Twice?" Hopefully the kid saw the comment and stopped his belly-aching.
Time passes, as it tends to, and about a week ago my buddy Dennis was
commenting on a BBC special about Paul McCartney recording at Abbey
Road and within the doc Paul shows his audience how multi-track recording works. He strums a guitar and records a little ditty, hits stop and hits
rewind. But since he's been around those big old ( wonderful ) analog
machines for so long he instinctively reaches out and 'helps' the machine
get up to rewind speed with his fingers - we all did that, it helped.
Which leads me to something I stumbled upon today:
http://www.sonomawireworks.com/ Sonoma is offering a little app. that works on your i-phone that turns the beast into a four-track recorder. How cool is that?
So now we have this - a four track studio on an i-phone...
My question: What the Hell are we supposed to do with a lousy 4 tracks?!?