What We're Gonna Do Right Here is Go Back

I spent 90 minutes on FriendsReunited, and much to my surprise found one person from my past. Just the one. I sat next to Darren when we were 15 and pretending to study GCSE maths. He was something way over six foot, had hair ruthlessly moussed to point straight up, bad acne and one overriding interest - experimental dance music.

I was the architypal target for bullying - small, brainy, gentle, queer in both senses and militantly uninterested in sport. He was the great dumb cheerful lummox ambling towards a life of spaced out bankruptcy.

But we shared an in interest in music that was big on invention and small on the traditional virtues of the well crafted song. He introduced me to the back catalogue of Kraftwerk, and the burgeoning Chicago house scene, a year before every other teenager got into it. I owe a lot of my musical consciousness to Darren.

Now it seems he's married, on the property ladder and working in electronics. If I paid UKP7.50 to become a full member of FriendReunited, I could send him an email. Not that we'd probably have much to say to each other.

At least...I think it's him. I don't know.
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No proper song recording today, but a crash course in the uses and limitations of the Tascam DP-01FX. It offers a wide range of completely useless effects, basic but usable 2-band EQ, no way to control the monitor level of input, phantom power, rubbish display, recording at 44.1KHz 16-bit Mono, and portability for around UKP500.

Compare with my M-Audio 1010LT soundcard, which offers no effects at all (but software postprocessing does all I need), no EQ (ditto), controlable monitor, no phantom power (but none needed), helpful display, recording up to 96MHz 32-bit stero, and no portability for around UKP200.

Both offer 8 mono or 4 stereo tracks, with simultainious recording on 2 mono or 1 stereo.

In short, I'm paying for portability and sacrificing sound quality. No surprise.

The only really annoying thing is I can't boost the microphone monitor level - so I take off one headphone, listen to the backing through one ear and monitor myself the natural way through the other ear.

The one thing it would be great to have but neither system can do is apply chorusing/reverb/compression to the microphone monitor during recording, but leave the recorded track dry. That way I could hear roughly how my voice would sound after processing, without being stuck with the settings I happened to use during recording.