This article will be a work in progress as I make my way through working with my new Zoom R4 multitrack recorder.
I got mine for around $200 from Guitar Center. My local Salt Lake store had them in stock so I was able to pop in and pick one up on a July 4th holiday. Seems they’re readily available. You can also find them on Amazon, of course. dabodab’s affiliate link is https://amzn.to/3RZlU7c .
Zoom has several multitracks in their lineup. I have an H8 which has more tracks and more inputs; you can record more things simultaneously. It also has apps for field recording and other things that attempt to tick a number of boxes.
My first Zoom was the H5 and I still use it for digitizing and I’ve used for recording quick live takes of songs.
The Zoom R4 takes the features found in these units and focuses on offering a dedicated multitrack recording experience for musicians. I kind of see it as a portable sketchpad that I can load into Logic and for that workflow it works very well in my initial few days with it.
My First Recording
I’ve started working on a new album and want to try some different approaches; I have nothing really in mind just yet.
Out of the box, the R4 doesn’t come with a require micro SD card, which isn’t unusual; I was prepared for that and ordered one on Amazon. I chose a SanDisk 128 SDXC with these specs: 160MB/s, C10, U3, V30, 4K, A2, which means it has a bit faster access. I don’t know if that is really necessary, but there’s not a huge price difference. I plan to offload tracks as I go so I don’t thing I’ll need more than 128 GB. I got one with a standard SD card adapter because I plan to remove the micro SD from the R4 and load the files into Logic from the card on my Mac. The R4 will wirelessly transfer files but I haven’t tried that yet; I’ve heard it’s slow — I’ll let you know.
My first session I recorded a couple Arturia Microfreak stereo tracks. The R4’s tracks are mono so recording stereo takes up 2 tracks panned left and right. I didn’t pan them while recording because I didn’t see how that was done until I thought everything was sounding mono and found the settings quickly enough. The R4 is pretty intuitive, which isn’t necessarily the case with these kinds of units with all the menu diving involved. There’s not as much of that with the R4. Maybe I’ll discover more once I start using the effects and amp modeling and start recording vocals.
After filling up the four tracks with two stereo Microfreaks, I bounced them down to the dedicated bounce track which is a prominent feature of the R4. You can either set the levels and “quick bounce” tracks 1-4 to the extra bounce track (which is a stereo track) or you can bounce in real time, adjusting the faders as you go.
After bouncing, tracks 1-4 are empty (sort of) so you can record more tracks. I recorded another stereo synth on tracks 1 and 2 using my Korg Wavestate.
At that point, the song was sounding about where I wanted it before moving over to Logic, so I extracted the SD card and moved to the mac.
When you open the card on the computer you find that the R4 saves all of the individual tracks with an numbering scheme that makes sense. You can tell which file is which track and which take. I had 4 files for the 2 stereo track on tracks 1 and 2 and 2 files for the stereo tracks 3 and 4. The bounce track was also available, but it’s not really needed here unless you want to start with the bounced mix.
I noticed the tracks come in louder than what they appeared to be on the R4. I’ll need some more experience with it to understand what’s going on there. I found myself dropping the gain to -20 db.
In Logic, I added a piano from the Hammer Keys sample library and I’m calling it good for now.
More to come…
