Until late 70s, recording a music demo was an expensive, complex, low quality and almost unthinkable process; cheapest reel-to-reel recording machines were not even aimed at the average consumer, neither in terms of price nor ease of use, making studios and music insdury have some control over audio recording.
The Tascam's Portastudio, a line of multi-track cassette recorders aimed for home recordings, brought something that studio hardly offer: Technical ease and inmedacy. The democratization and inmediate results of music recording inherently affected other parts of the music making process such as the composition and arrangements.
Following the line, in 2010s and 2020s the digitalization gave to the studio recording a surprisingly ease and inmediacy compared to the previous decades, now studio versions can be recorded at home with a not-so expensive gear. This caused some negative effects in demo culture: A) Since studio versions can be recorded at home, demo recordings starded to feel tedious and economicaly unnecesary; B) Though digital recording brought inmediacy to the studio recordings, techical details like driver configuration, latency and an infinite amount of different sounds hinders the main inmediacy of demos, increasing the increasing the sense of unnecessariness and tediousnes.
Notadaw is my personal attempt to give a little fraction of the benefits we used to have, priorizing inmediacy and use rather than quality. I personally think phones must be what Portastudios were, making "Pocket Studios" with complex and infinite functions, is stupid.
Notadaw is an Android App to record multitrack audio in a fast and analogic (and rudimentary) way. The main point is that the internal microphone captures both the "main track" (what is wanted to record) and the speaker output, resulting in a sort of mix of both tracks... I used this method to record two guitars when i was like 15.
This method allows you to record without troubling latency or having to learn a complex interface to just record a basic demo in your phone. sacrificing quality in pro of a fluid workflow for demos.
The air, the echo, and the simply fact of recording the output of an speaker with a microphone, degradates the previous track, making them lose frequences and quality. Based on that: Record the less prominent instruments and tracks in the first layers, setting the latest layers to the most important ones. Also record from a considerable distance from the microphone, the room reverb will homogenize the mix.
There is not a single standard order to record instruments, distances from the instrument to the mic, etc. Some samples will be presented on following.
At the moment, all samples cover Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello
| Sample # | 01 |
| Tracks # | 2 |
| Track 1 | Guitar |
| Track 2 | Vox |
| Distance | 22cm / 8.66' from microphone |
| Notes | Recording the vocals in the last layer give it presence. |
| Sample # | 02 |
| Tracks # | 3 |
| Track 1 | Guitar |
| Track 2 | Vox |
| Track 3 | Vox |
| Distance | 22cm / 8.66' from microphone |
| Notes | Here, the latest recorded voice becomes the main voice, souding louder and more present |
| Sample # | 03 |
| Tracks # | 1 |
| Track 1 | Guitar + Voice |
| Distance | 22cm / 8.66' from microphone |
| Notes | Most "natural" mix, the audio recording session of Notadaw disables all the filters bringing the closes thing to a vanilla sound of the mic. |
| Sample # | 04 |
| Tracks # | 2 |
| Track 1 | Guitar + Voice (First Verse, chorus parts) |
| Track 1 | Guitar + Voice (Chorus) |
| Distance | 22cm / 8.66' from microphone |
| Notes | Being double recorded in both tracks, guitar sounds consistent and present. |
Notadaw is currently on Beta.
Though I have some ideas to make this app better, sadly, the Android audio system is very abusive and hardly lets set a deep audio profile, and since this app is designed specifically for phones, I won't switch to another platform.
My main focus is centered in optimizing the code, and fixing errors, new ideas are open and apreciated but as menctiones before, its implementation is hooked to the Android limitations.