Los Angeles, CA (June 29, 2017)—Four-time Grammy-winning producer and engineer Robert Carranza got his start on a Tascam Ministudio Porta One—and he still uses it, alongside Tascam’s DV-RA1000HD master recorder and DA-3000 stereo master recorder/ADDA converter.
“I credit the Porta One for starting my career because it helped me from the garage to the studio, where they handed me a mop and broom and told me to go clean up,” laughs Carranza. “My wife, then my girlfriend, bought the Porta One for me as a gift, and I used it to make our band demos. That four-track became any studio I wanted it to be, anywhere I wanted it to be. Everything I needed was in one little box.”
In addition to his DAW, Carranza, who has worked with such artists as Marilyn Manson, Jack Johnson, Los Lobos, Beck and The Mars Volta, also records to analog tape, as he did for Johnson’s number-one-ranked 2008 album Sleep Through the Static.
He still uses his Porta One. “It’s amazing: The technology still works, and it still sounds good. It has outlasted the case it was in and still looks like new. Sometimes when I want to keep it simple—say, when a singer/songwriter comes in—I use it to get a quick recording. We even used the Porta One to record Los Lobos tracks one time.”
Today, Carranza and Jack Johnson co-own a recording studio that they built into a 100-year-old house in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles. “The house is big enough for the record company, as well as the studio, and it’s all solar powered,” Carranza observes. “The cabling, the two tape machines, and some of the acoustic treatment are recycled from other studios. Instead of building from scratch, we built from recycled parts.”
Recycled, that is, except for some key items, notably including his TASCAM Porta One, which is original equipment.
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