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Post subject: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:17 am
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... I found one of my very early recordings. Here it is.

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If I thought it was any good I'd pay to get it digitally transferred but it's my old indie band and probably a bit embarrassing to listen to now.

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This made me wonder, how many people here have ever recorded onto multitrack tape?

I still say it sounds better than digital. That tape's one inch 16 track but I recorded in Germany on a two inch 24 track Otari back in the day and that sounded phenomenal. Even if the technician had to spend hours every week degaussing the machine and cleaning everything with isopropyl alcohol.

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:35 am
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it would be nice to listen to us, having myself save a publication in 1977 on an 8-tracks and transfer them to an audio cassette.
I had the lower part, drums, rhythm, solo alone in my room and since the tape was eaten by a tape recorder!
There is nothing left!

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 5:17 am
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It's getting hard now to even find a machine that'll play back old multitracks. I do know a guy who still has a Fostex E-16 so it could theoretically happen, I'm pretty sure the master tape has SMPTE time code on one track so I could even sync up a computer and transfer it all into Cubase. I just don't think the songs are worth the effort though, it would be for nostalgia reasons only.

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 10:29 am
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I still own a few of theses tape machines; 8 track 1/2 inch Studer Revox and 8 track otari mx50/50, some sort of Teac but the Tape is so &&*#$# expensive and it seem my old stock is disintegrating as I type, I end up using pro tools or sound forge just for cost reasons, but there is nothing like the tape sound and cutting of tape and the mess of off cut offs at the end of the day lot of fun
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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 11:31 am
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That tape sound is something I miss. That and big Otaris the size of a gas cooker with dodgy reel brakes that meant you had to stop it rewinding about two minutes before the start of the tape or it would all wind through the machine and you'd have to thread it up again.

Kids these days don't know what they're missing. Someone should write a plugin that simulates all that.

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 11:37 am
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I miss the old Tandberg. They made the best reel recorders ever.
Watching it feed the tape, fasten it to the empty spool by itself, and then automatically spooling back and forth to sync with the first signal detected on the tape was a treat. The only thing it missed was movable arms to take supersized reels. And you had to be careful not to knock it over, cause it was kind of top heavy.

(And we're probably dating ourselves here...)


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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:05 pm
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I've just remembered how you could push the record levels up so they peaked into the red and the tape wouldn't distort, it would just start to clip and compress. Try that on digital, your recording will be ruined.

Damn, I want a big tape machine now.

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:23 pm
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I have a box full of Ampex 456 masters. Mine are 1/2" from my Teac 80-8, which is long gone. I also have all of the 2 track masters that the songs were mixed down to. The original recordings were done around '76 to '78.
Sometime around 2000 I got a 2 track and transferred the songs to digital files. At that time the tapes were starting to degrade both physically and sound wise. The digital files are lacking a lot of dynamics and definition.
I'm glad I did the transfers while I still could, but the results are barely worth listening to.
What I miss a little is the fact that I was good at editing with tape. It took a good ear, steady hand, sharp blade, proper aluminum block, knowledge of the tape recorder, and lastly the balls to just slice that sucker and hope for the best. I used to jockey the reel till I was right on the beat I wanted. You had to be in a zone. There was no "Undo" button.

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 4:09 pm
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arth1 wrote:
(And we're probably dating ourselves here...)


I wouldn't worry about it arth, the thread contents appear to me at least, like the basics for the next Star Wars epic. I picked this titbit up from the blog on the UFP post I made a week or so ago, "We had a selection of great musicians in arguably the finest room in London, with some of the most extraordinary recording kit on the planet. We had 2″ tape, feeding CLASP, into Prisms, into ProTools, through a Neve." not totally a bygone era then, just wondered if yourself, Frank and others thought tape actually made any difference to the end product in your case, or was it the ease of recording? something else?


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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 4:52 pm
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I got into Cubase around the time I made that recording on the tape I found this morning. At the time Cubase was two floppy disks on the Atari 1040, synced to the tape with SMPTE. The studio I used had bought a stack of MIDI gear after reading magazine reviews and no one had the time to figure out how to use SMPTE, they were submixing all the synth tracks onto the 16 track while the JL Cooper box gathered dust.

So they got me to sit down and read manuals - there was no internet back then! I eventually cracked it around 5am one morning, recorded a quick few tracks on the tape with the MIDI synced up and left a note on the desk saying "PRESS PLAY". The engineer was stunned that he could get 15 tracks of audio and 16 tracks of MIDI mixed to two track, it was like black magic back then.

And now anyone with a computer can do it.

But tape still sounds better.

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 6:08 pm
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Yeah, and outhouses were way better than indoor plumming. :lol: :lol: :lol:

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:16 am
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I was a broadcasting major in college back in the '90s and was part of the last generation of students to actually learn audio editing on the old reel-to-reel machines. Professionally, I never used anything other than digital editing equipment and couldn't imagine ever going back to cutting and splicing tape. The digital editing equipment is far, far easier and more convenient to use.


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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:44 am
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ripitup555 wrote:
just wondered if yourself, Frank and others thought tape actually made any difference to the end product in your case, or was it the ease of recording? something else?

To me, it was perhaps the feel of doing a recording more than anything.
You saw the reels turning, mesmerizingly, at different speeds depending on how much were on them. You knew (in my case, at least, not having an unlimited tape supply) that you were irreversibly overwriting another track. You had to know your tape machine well enough to know exactly where to cut and splice. There was the anticipation when rewinding. There was feeding signal from one recorder to another, knowing that each time you did so, quality would degrade, but yet, you had to, to remix.
And there were was adjusting the headroom based on real physical VU meters. I miss those.

It was a "measure twice, cut once" world, where you needed to get things right in as few tries as possible. Now, it doesn't matter, because past the recording, you can always redo everything with hundreds of minor variations and pick what works best after the fact. Nothing is irreversible, and you can make changes early in the process without having to redo everything done later.

And that change is mostly good. Recording and mixing has become easier and more accessible.
But it also is an equalizer, where there's now less difference in the quality of work, for better and for worse. Alan Parsons with a DAW isn't that much more impressive than the average Joe, but he sure was a genius with reel-to-reel recorders and big desk mixers. Some of the brilliance and inventiveness has, perhaps, been lost.


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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 7:27 am
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My father had the first recording studio in Iowa that was willing to record rock & roll artists. This was in the 50s and he helped a lot of up and coming acts make the demos that they took to New York or LA or Nashville, though most of them just ended up back here in the Midwest.

The meat and potatoes of my father's recording business was making commercials for radio and then cutting the records on his four big disc recorders. He was a master of the those machines, though what I remember most was the vacuum system he had set up to suck away the acetate threads as the the disc recorders cut those aluminum-core masters.

Those were the days. I remember when he got his first multi-track recorder, an Ampex 8-track that used 1/2" tape, He thought he had died and gone to heaven. He sold the recording business in the late 70s to some younger guys who thought they were gonna set the world on fire - no idea if they did or not.

My father died last March. He and I had talked about all the old master tapes he still had from the recording studio and what he was going to do with them. For years he had dreams of transferring them to computer, but he never got close to doing that. Now I have to see if I can get the masters from my stepmother. They're in Texas...

One more ironic event worth mentioning: I was in an antique mall yesterday browsing and I stumbled upon one of my father's original hand-cut LPs! It was a recording of a three-piece band from the 60s called The Preferred Stock. It even had a label on it that I had typed myself and stuck on with rubber cement - very hi-tech! IF it had been more reasonably priced, I might have bought it.

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Post subject: Re: Under the bed ...
Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 7:48 am
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shimmilou wrote:
Yeah, and outhouses were way better than indoor plumming. :lol: :lol: :lol:


Can you even grow plums indoors?

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