h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I spent half my income tax return money on something
most people have absolutely no need for: a home recording device
that will allow me to make my own cds.
It is a Tascam Portastudio with an 8gig hard drive and 8 usuable channels and all kinds onboard effects that also has a cd burner built in.

always wanted to make my own album.

Philosophy on recording equipment: with two vernier speed controlled tape recorders (dial type speed controls) and a metronome, its possible to synthesize any musical tone; simply a matter of recording the number of beats you want to compress into a second and compressing them*... doubling or halving speed makes an approximate octave of difference in tonality. Its necessary though to fine tune a little by ear on the same principle that a strict arithmetic mean tuned piano sounds a little flat. Vernier controls work better for this than digitals. The principle has been brought into entertainment application. ("Alvin and the Singing Chipmunks" one of the lighter and more frivolous examples. I used to get a kick out varying speed of play on that one.)

*The principle provides a 'bridge' between percussion and harmony, allowing an integration of the two.

You should hear what I can do with an electric guitar, a digital delay and a cassette recorder.

I bought a deck with a CD burner because few of my friends have cassette machines anymore. also, eight tracks is more fun than one.

What are you going to do with it, Tonsil?

Make a lot of noise.

I've always wanted to make me own album.

Unfortunately, unless I have misread the poorly written manual, there is no way to speed up or slow down any of the tracks. I'll just have to make the funny noises on my own.

Always wanted to make a Goon or Firesign Theatre like album. Here's my chance.

One of those things about the current generation of microcircuit designers, so crazed with the digital revolution and obsessed with pursuit of quantum limits that they've forgotten the advantages of analog systems.

Apparently they think that since wave mechanical harmonic mean determinations are approximately equivalent to quantum arithmetic mean determinations they needn't bother about both, even though if that were so, they wouldn't be able to compute their cycles per second but instead would have to count them on their fingers or use a Babbage counter or reasonable equivalent (quantum analog systems).

Myself, I don't like being locked in a box that way.

What a lovely image of you making Goon-type noises, Tonsil!

Let me know how you get on with it.

Three months or so along, I have manufactured almost an hundred "songs" on the hard drive of the tascam Dp-o2 Portastudio.

http://forum.recordingreview.com/f30/tascam-dp-02fx-reviews-8542/

It's actually been a real education for me in the art of getting crappy japanese musical technology to work in a useful fashion.
I've had the occasion to try to get guitar and other musical toys to almost work in ways they were not intended many times over the last thirty years. This time I have a manual to muck things up.
Still, I've managed to get it to do a couple things its not really supposed to and a lot of things I probably shouldn't do.