I must be the only person in this thread that hasnt used tape !
 
My 'Way of the DAW' came about after finding midi ports on the side of my Atari and being loaned a copy of 'Notator' and  borrowing a Yamaha keybaord, after which I bought a Roland MT32 Synth Mudule and started creating midi backing tracks.
 
Once audio started being added to software sequencers I still used to think ...... 'Audio - So what'
 
How wrong I was 

ampfixer
Today everyone with an iphone is a photographer, and everyone with a DAW in their basement has a studio...

Very nicely written post! Unfortunately the world has shifted in a way from quality to quantity... interestingly, these also both have the same hurdle on the people these are shared with, which is time (or lack thereof). Throw in the internet, and we get inundated with both.
 
I did find it interesting that you still use your Tascam. Mine has been sitting in its original box under my desk for 15 years now, and I only tend to look at it in moments of frustration to remind me of "what was."

The more I read threads like this, the more I realise I don't really care much about media formats and specific bits of gear and all that. And I'm not of a nostalgic persuasion about anything.
 
Obviously, you always want to be using the best tools you can get your hands for any given job. Which can be constrained by budget, or logistics, or time, or any number of things. And then it comes time to make the record and you've got to make the record, with whatever happens to be there.

Tape has got a certain thing to it, but it's also a pain in the butt to keep a tape-based system running optimally. If the time and resource is there to deal with that, then great. If it's not, no big deal.

I don't miss tape one bit. Nostalgia tends to wear rose colored lenses. We get into old man talk mode and forget all the things that sucked about tape.

Indeed. Also, the thing about the old days is, they're the old days. Unless you've got a time machine handy, we're not going back. I'm interested in how to make actual good records now, not hypothetical good records in a possibly imaginary version of the past.

This comes up in various media formats. I have a photographer friend who is in his 70s and he does not miss film one bit. Inhaling chemicals and fumbling in the dark or having your work ruined by onn light leak is awful. Many of the things we love about the old ways are heavily based on familiarity and lifelong conditioning.

And selective memory, I'd wager. I've spliced tape with a razor blade. It was an absolute nightmare.

I remember the first time repairing a broken cassette tape with scotch tape and a razor and feeling it was magical. By the time I was 20 I realized how annoying it was to do and that no matter how great of a job I did it was still going to be a piece of song I could not recover.

True, there are thousands of people with DAWs who call themselves producers and will make a demo or record for next to nothing—maybe even for free.  That is why I am no longer in the business of making demos.  The ones I made may have been a lot better than the ones made by the teenager who got an iPad for Christmas, but people checking around for prices don't know that, and they may not even know the difference in the final product.
 
But with adversity comes opportunity.  There is an serious dearth of people who write high quality songs and develop new styles of music.  We are way overdue for the next Beatles.  You cannot compete with all the people who write four note pop songs with two repeated lines of lyrics, so don't try.