Tascam Digital Portastudio DP-01FX

The Tascam DP-01FX is a versatile and feature packed digital recording studio that can have first time users sounding pretty professional and all at a pretty reasonable price.

Firstly, looks wise this piece of kit hits the mark with its sleak curves and a metallic silver exterior.

The built in hardrive is sufficient for a lot of multi-tracked songs at 40 Gb.

This multi-tracker has 8 tracks which all have there own faders, mute/record buttons and can all be EQ'd individually with dedicated EQ knobs, panners and effects send/receive funtions. This is a vast improvement on other digital multitrackers which just use a screen and a dodgy interface to manage all these controls. However, having said that, the EQ knobs are fairly elementary in that for each track you just have one knob to control highs and one knob to control low frequencies. This is not versatile and as such I found myself pretty much ignoring the EQ knobs and waiting until the whole song was exported to a PC and using some proper software such as Cubase SX or Protools to produce and master the recorded tracks.

The differences between this DP-01FX model and the slightly cheaper DP-01 model are twofold. Firstly the FX model has two phantom powered XLR microphone inputs on the front whereas the non-FX model on has jack inputs and as such two tracks can be recorded to simultaneously. I find this to be a necessity and if you're a traditionalist like me and insist on miking up amps instead of plugging straight into the deck then its worth the extra 40 or 50 quid. Secondly this FX version does have inbuilt effects that you can add to your tracks after recording them. Namely this means reverb ad there are a number of different types and parameters for this reverb and you can get some quite nice results from it.

Now as for the recording process itself, well its actually very easy and very versatile. You have a lot of tools at your fingertips and the inteface Tascam provide you with makes it very easy to use. The tools included are what you would expect from something that perhaps is higher priced. You can bounce tracks together, copy, erase, punch in and out to 100ths of a second accuracy and its all very easy to control.

The sound quality you can get from this is quite astounding. I used a ?45 AKG instrument mic and recorded a variety of sounds including all sorts of electric guitars, acoustic guitars and drums (yes thats right I recorded a drum kit with only one mic and it worked very well!). Once you've had a bit of practice and you're getting all your levels right you can produce something very professional sounding. As I mentioned before should you choose to produce and master the track onboard you will be limited in scope with what you can do but its important to note that this can be done. And you can output your final mastered track to a PC in wave format. I prefer to export all tracks individually and use software and again these are exported in wave format. It is a USB cable needed to connect to a computer though as per usual no USB cable is included.

When delving into the software side of things on this unit you have a number of options at your disposable. Obviously, create/edit/delete songs and tracks but what is handy is the ability to lock songs so they can't be erased erroneously.

Be careful though, if you switch this unit off with out hitting the shutdown button you'll lose any work you had done beforehand!

Dedicated controls to each track, including, pan, effects send, fader, & high & low EQ.

Excellent sound quality. Extremely professional results can be achieved with this kit.

Simple interface allows you to control complicated details very easily.

All standard functions are there as expected (punch in & out, bounce, master etc)

Looks cool on your desk!

2x Phantom powere XLR mic inputs.

Simultaneous recording of 2 tracks.

The mastering tools such as EQ and effects are limited in scope but are better than what you normally get at this price. Still, you're better off doing all this after exporting the tracks to a PC.

Ultimately this is a fantastic digital 8 track thats has a lot more going for it than anything else in this price range. In fact it could probably still hold its own if it was 50-100 punds more expensive so you get a lot of bang for your buck here.

I highly recommend this product to both beginners and mid level users due to its sheer array of features, the fact it is so easy to use, and the fantastic quality results you can get once you're accustomed to recording acoustic/electric intstruments.