Tascam 388

Just look at the thing – bloody magnificent isn’t it? For about 5 years the Tascam 388 ruled my life as I was variously trying to lift it, get it repaired, find it accommodation and even actually use it to make recordings. Having been gifted a certain sum of money from the sale of her own mother’s house, when I was 18 or so my mother offered to buy something substantial for both my sister and me. Sister chose a second-hand car – a Datsun Cherry maybe, or if not something like it. Perversely perhaps, given that I had no means of moving it and no permanent address, I chose the Tascam. The Tascam, which weighs possibly only a couple of pounds less than a Datsun Cherry.

During the 5 or so years I used the Tascam 388, depending on university term dates, cash-flow and the less than seamless transition from one major relationship to another, I lived in a shared house in Plymouth, university halls, a flat in Clapham, back to the Plymouth house for 2 months, a house in Greenwich, then Gray’s Inn Road central London, a lovely Georgian place in Islington, Brixton (briefly), a short stay at my mother’s place in South Devon (very much between relationships at this point), Battersea, then Vauxhall, a short let in Bloomsbury and then back to a different flat on Gray’s Inn Road. Suffice to say that by the end of this period in my life I had at least developed a crude lifting technique, which involved swinging the thing up at specific angle which in turn allowed me to, in short planned phases, singly lug the unit into the back of a van, taxi or even up one flight of stairs at a time.

Unsurprisingly, on the two occasions I was burgled when I owned the 388, clearly the burglars themselves considered it surplus to requirements.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Tascam 388, it was basically a giant Portastudio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portastudio - that used 7-inch spools of quarter inch tape, rather than cassettes, to provide 8 tracks of recording. To the left of the recording section was a reasonably well appointed mixing section, and along the top of the unit a set of nicely laid out meters, so you could see what your audio was up to. Whilst a professional engineer would no doubt have had an issue with the quality of the mixing desk, in terms of flexibility and signal quality, that wasn’t the problem for me and the 388. Rather it was the tape recorder that suffered from two main issues: firstly it didn’t sound any good, and secondly when it wasn’t sounding any good, it was broken. Repeatedly.

Over the years just about everything that could go wrong with the reel-to-reel unit did go wrong. The pinch roller which kept the tape running cleanly over the recording head wore out quickly, creating a pleasing tremolo effect on everything during a brief period of it’s physical decline, the tension arms were a constant problem, the record head wore out very quickly (probably because there was too much tension caused by the arms being too tight) and finally the motor surrendered. Parts of it I replaced myself, but I’m grateful to Keith, drummer and good friend, for lifts to places as varied as Camden and Watford, (and I think somewhere unexpected once like Newton Abbot) where you could find a qualified Tascam engineer.

Running at 7.5 inches a second, the 388 was never likely to be a particularly high-fidelity recorder (though God knows what the reliability would have been like if they’d designed the thing to run at 15 inches a second), but the noise reduction system on it was surprisingly good, and it certainly had a sound of its own. It shied away from the bass end of the frequency spectrum, but could be encouraged to do stuff at the other end of the frequency range if you gambled and recorded with loads of treble boost on the way in. What came back never quite sounded like that which went in, but once you got used to the thing, finding work arounds first became part of the charm, and then you didn’t even realise you were doing it.

So it was ludicrously heavy, hopelessly impractical to own at that point in my life, and didn’t actually sound very good. But it was absolutely brilliant. It was a world I could just lose myself in – on those infrequent occasions when I recorded something that worked, that other people agreed worked, I’d have a sense of complete freedom in that the Tascam made me feel that just about anything that I wanted to do was sonically achievable. But this musical freedom was quite the antithesis of the impact the machine had on my personal life – in that respect it was a millstone: every flat rental would be predicated around where I could conceivably put the thing, I had to call in countless favours to shift it, and funnily enough ownership of such a technological marvel transpired to have little or no effect on my perceived levels of attractiveness. A Datsun Cherry may have had more so, simply because if its unarguable greater practicality in non-musical social interaction.

When I was still living in Devon, I occasionally hired the 388 and my services as an engineer to local bands, for I think the princely sum of £30 a day. Given that such an amount would double my then weekly disposable income, the work was irresistible. Most memorable was ‘Who’s Rachel?’ who had a track that, over the course of innumerable verses, sped up from catatonically slow to unplayably fast (at least unplayably for the band in question). But I liked them and I really liked their name. It transpired that it was borne out of countless conversations they’d had in which they’d all drone on, rarely actually listening to each other, when someone would crack and enquire, after a stream of anecdotes relating to some particular individual, ‘who’s Rachel?’

With a laptop and some free software, you can put a far better recording system today at a fraction of the cost and weight. Or you could spend similar amounts of money and put a ridiculously better quality system together. But then you don’t really notice or remember the stuff that just does what it’s supposed to do. On the days it was working, the 388 made me feel quite uncannily good. I miss that feeling, if not the 388 itself.