Tascam Model 35
An eight-in, four-bus, eight-out console that working studios bought by the pallet - and then customized until it barely resembled the catalog photo.
Overview
The Model 35 turns up in the background of a hundred studio photographs from the early Eighties, usually with a strip of masking tape on the channel one fader and a rack of outboard gear stacked somewhere it doesn't belong. It's an 8x4x8 audio mixing console - eight inputs, four buses, eight outputs - sold as the front end for the Tascam eight-track tape world. Dealers paired it with the Model 38 half-inch eight-track and a Model 32 quarter-inch two-track as a turnkey package. One American pro audio dealer advertised exactly that bundle, with the console, recorders, monitors, amps and a reverb unit, for $6,200. That was pitched as a savings of over $1,700 off list.
The Model 35 was a platform. British retailer listings of the period show the console sitting alongside an "M35 Ex-Expand" unit, an expander that let owners grow the frame, and the secondhand columns are full of Model 35s modified well past factory spec. The best example comes from a Canadian musician's studio profile in Canadian Musician (date and page not confirmed in available excerpts), in which songwriter Stan Meissner describes his basement 24-track room and admits his "Tascam Model 35 board which isn't the greatest but it's been customized and it's 32 channel."
The period press treated it as a serious-production tool rather than a toy. Modern Recording (July 1981, p.27) ran a piece built around the Model 35 under the banner "Complete Service for 8." It argued that eight-track recording is serious business just like 16 or 24, and that the Model 35 offered the flexibility to expand as a studio's needs grew. That's the marketing line, of course.
One warning for anyone shopping today: the Model 35 name is shared. Modern Recording (April 1979, p.34) reported on a "model 35-2," a Tascam mastering deck with optional dbx, full-logic transport with motion sensing, a separate quarter-track playback head alongside the half-track record/play head, pitch control, punch-in, and a flip-up head cover. That is a tape machine, not a mixer. There is also a Studio Technologies Model 35 talent amplifier, a different product from a different company. Buyers searching for "Tascam Model 35" will run into all three, so confirm what's in the listing before bidding.
On the console itself, the assessment from the people who used them is mixed and specific. Studio Sound (March 1983, p.6) described the Model 30 and Model 35 as "2 improved 8 x 4 mixers... both built to good standards of construction," and the Model 35 did the job it was sold to do. But it was a budget console in an era when budget consoles were genuinely compromised, and the owners who loved them mostly loved them after the soldering iron came out. A stock Model 35 today is a project, not a plug-and-play purchase.
For collectors, the appeal is narrow and practical. It's an eight-channel, four-bus desk with the Tascam name on it, it turns up cheap relative to what a comparable console costs, and its modular nature means a dead channel is usually a dead channel and not a dead board. The catch is that documentation and parts are hard to find, and the expander units are far scarcer than the consoles themselves. Anyone considering one should expect to trace signal paths by hand.
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