A four-track cassette is a standard two-track cassette that has been modified by a four-track cassette recorder. These recorders simultaneously utilize both sides of the two-track tape as it passes the magnetic head, resulting in four-track capability. A four-track cassette cannot be played in a standard cassette player, as a standard player lacks the ability to play both sides of the tape at once. Instead, the music is mixed down to two tracks and recorded to standard media.
Affordable four-track cassette recorders were popular home studios in the early 1980s when digital alternatives were not yet available and compact disks were just peeking over the market’s horizon. Bundled with a mixing board for editing and mixing down tracks, digital drum machines and synthesizers helped round out the sound for music enthusiasts.
Today’s home studios have gone digital, with many incorporating a CD burner for an all-in-one solution. However, the cost of a digital studio starts at about $350 US Dollars (USD)— more if you’d like the built-in burner. A four-track cassette recorder starts at about $99 USD, a substantial savings for anyone on a strict budget who wants to get some basic music and vocals down.
Another advantage of four-track cassette recorders is that they are simple to operate. This is handy if you are the kind of musician who likes to “follow a mood,” falling upon riffs or melodies you want to remember later. With a four-track cassette recorder handy, you can push a button without disrupting your flow of creativity. Digital studios are a bit more complicated with buttons often serving double or triple duty, depending on which mode the machine is in. If you aren’t extremely familiar with your studio, by the time you set it up, the tune might be gone and your creative mood might have vanished with it.
A four-track cassette recorder can also be a great “scratch pad” for jam sessions and practices. The advantage of a digital studio, however, is that digital studios provide more sophisticated editing features and pure digital sound for taking a project to the finish line in a professional format that can be handed to any studio executive. The home studio that suits you best will depend on your needs and your pocketbook.
If you can’t afford a digital studio, you can always feed a four-track cassette signal to your computer through the recorder’s line-out port. Editing software is available if you’d like more options than the four-track cassette recorder affords. When you’re ready, you can burn to a CD from your hard disk. If you’d like to keep your recording on cassette, you can take the line-out to a standard cassette recorder and record your music to a tape that can be played on any cassette machine.
Some popular manufacturers of four-track cassette recorders include Fostex, Tascam and Korg. Cassette studios are available everywhere musical electronics are sold.