Yesterday

Here is the setup I used when creating tracks in the 70's and 80's, a few of which eventually were published as the album Undecidable in 2011, once self-publishing music started to become a thing:

graph LR

    subgraph " "

        subgraph early["Early Days"]
            piano["Piano"]
            arp2600["ARP 2600"]
            mic["Microphone"]
            portastudio["TASCAM PortaStudio 244"]
        end

        subgraph later["Added Over Time"]
            ob8["Oberheim OB-8"]
            dx7["Yamaha DX7"]
        end

        cassette(["Cassette Tape"])

        piano --> mic -- "analog\naudio" ---> portastudio
        arp2600 -- "analog\naudio" --> portastudio
        ob8 -- "analog\naudio" -----> portastudio
        dx7 -- "analog\naudio" -----> portastudio
        portastudio -- "analog\naudio" --> cassette

        classDef group stroke-dasharray: 5 5
        class early,later group

    end

• Wm Knabe & Co Piano
• ARP 2600
• Oberheim OB-8
• Yamaha DX7
• TASCAM PortaStudio 244

The Knabe piano I had as a kid was built in the 1930's and sounded far better in real life than on the surviving cassette recordings. Most of these recordings were made in my childhood bedroom or various apartments I had as a college student and young adult using decidedly consumer-level microphones and recording technologies of the era. The jankiness of the audio quality appeals to me as an artifact of the period of my life and the circumstances in which they were created, but I cannot argue with anyone who finds it less charming than I.