I've been thinking about how I might be able to record with the equipment I have on hand. I have an ADAT. I have a DAT deck. I have a mixing board. I have a laptop. Mostly what I'm thinking is recording 8 tracks at a time onto the ADAT, mixing that down to a 2 track stereo sub-mix on the laptop, and then doing that again as many times as I need to. The end result would be a number of stereo sub-mixes on the laptop that would be blended together to make a full mix.

Hell, if I bought another ADAT, I could use the second one for the sub-mixes instead of the laptop. But then I'd have to synchronize it. But I'd have to synchronize the one with the laptop anyway. Hmm. Well, the gist of this idea is that by using this technique (which recording engineers would refer to as “ping - ponging”), I could get 40 tracks out of two ADATs. Think that would be enough?

Long story short, the finished product would be pretty much the same as if I'd used a series of ADAT decks and mixed the tracks together all at once. It'll be a lot more intricate this way, but it makes an actual recording much closer to being a reality. That in itself gives me hope.