Recording to tape

Greetings all,

Just wondering if anyone out there records to tape, either as a mastering or during an intermittent stage?

Thinking of investing in some sort of Tascam X-track recorder (any suggestions?)

Is there any gain in stemming out your tracks individually to the tape, then mixing these tape-recorded tracks, or better to just wait till the songs mixed and then glue it altogether with a final tape mastering?

Have done some recordings to tape, but this was just a final stage and more so exporting the songs to cassette, not at a pre-mastering stage.

hit me with your suggestion sticks

I use tape as much as I can. I love the sound you get although it can range from non existent to subtle to drastic depending on the material. I use it both the ways you suggested although I am yet to master a finished piece on my main electronic project. I have used that mainly for bands and my guitar based stuff. Because it's an 8 track I can either track to it which I do mostly when I am not doing synced tempo stuff or can send mixes to it whether it be a stereo master or 4 stereo busses to be mixed on the mixer on the way out. Obviously the latter is better as you get the most out of the tape width but you can still get beneficial results from just using two tracks depending what you want at the end.

Basically, if you want to get into tape then you have to be up for the process and that process be really enjoyable as I'm sure you can get similar (not the same) results from software. The compression it gives when cranked and the way it seems to fill out a mix and turn the material from an airy amateur sounding in the box mix into a mix that could have been done 30 years ago and you can no longer hear your mixing processes makes the time spent totally worth while.

Saying that, to some ears it will make things sound worse, especially regarding electronic music. If you like wide, clean music where everything has it's own space, much like most music today, this will probably sound shit to you.

Maybe it's worth trying it out on a mix before you invest.

PM me if you want me to send a short mix to tape to see if you like the difference?

  On 5/11/2015 at 8:20 PM, Chesney said:

The compression it gives when cranked and the way it seems to fill out a mix and turn the material from an airy amateur sounding in the box mix into a mix that could have been done 30 years ago and you can no longer hear your mixing processes makes the time spent totally worth while.

 

yeah this, that's why tape is so lovely most of the time

I've been dumping mixes to S-VHS lately, good quality video equipment is amazingly cheap right now and S-VHS has a really nice sound

Def get a tape recorder if your interested in dirtying up your sound and if your into distortion in general. I got a little yamaha 4 track and I'll often bounce shit out of the computer into my SP 303 and bounce that material back and forth.

Theres also a bunch of goofy tricks you can do like getting a slowed down/sped up wobble by applying pressure to the pause button. Also my tape machine's sample rate is quick so if you take the tape out and put it in a regular tape player, it sounds super slow, like 2 octaves lower and slower. Of course, cranking the gain way high while recording gives it a cool, lo fi saturation.

Everything about tape is fucking awesome imo and I can't really think of any downsides besides the fact that the workflow isn't super fast like on a DAW but this is obvious when working with older technology.

  On 5/12/2015 at 7:42 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

my tape machine's sample rate

Don't touch the DATs.

I have a standard jvc tape deck which i used to dupe an EP with - but i'm guessing i'll be wanting a Tascam X-track such as this?:

  On 5/11/2015 at 8:20 PM, Chesney said:

Maybe it's worth trying it out on a mix before you invest.
PM me if you want me to send a short mix to tape to see if you like the difference?

Boy howdy, that's awful kind of you to offer - what sort of tape machine do you have? Is it that reel-to-reel machine i see in your lovely studio pics? If so, it may be a teasing test as I can't imagine us investing that much at the moment, more so looking at cheaper lo-fi options

(came across a Akai MG1fD on a local buy+sell site, tempting but also probably overkill for now)

  On 5/11/2015 at 11:08 PM, RSP said:

I've been dumping mixes to S-VHS lately, good quality video equipment is amazingly cheap right now and S-VHS has a really nice sound

Ooo please do praytell - someone suggested we do this a while back but could never figure out a good way of doing it. What's your method? I've done a good bit of VHS video glitch work, but never for audio.

  On 5/12/2015 at 7:42 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

Def get a tape recorder if your interested in dirtying up your sound and if your into distortion in general. I got a little yamaha 4 track and I'll often bounce shit out of the computer into my SP 303 and bounce that material back and forth.

Oh cool, so you keep looping the recording back and forth, in a way? Re-recording the song/sample over and over, degrading and artifacting it each time?

I record samples and loops to crappy cassette recorders quite a lot, especially beat loops, mainly for distortion etc. Just a straight record will pick up a bit of static, giving your samples a rougher sound. Cranking up the volume will clip the samples, but the effect sounds quite different to what you'd achieve if you max out the headroom digitally. You can also have fun distorting samples by physically screwing up the tape, running magnets over it, etc

A thrift store near me recently had an old cassette recorder with a slider that controlled the recording speed real-time, was gone last time I went, I really wish I picked it up now

I love bouncing stuff to cassette even though the results aren't always great; it's about the process, as Chesney was saying. I have a bunch of old 70s and 80s era cassettes lying around and there's an audible difference between different brands, with some sounding fat and squashy and others being thinner and more metallic, almost. Bouncing tracks pretty hot to cassette brings out some frequencies and damps others; cassette seems pretty midrangey.

I'd love to have proper tape to play with, but cassettes are a fun way to get your shit out of the computer and into the analogue realm, even if it often does end up sounding kind of crap. For me, the trouble lies in getting the cassette-recorded stuff back into the digital realm; things I've mixed on tape often sound great on a decent hi-fi, but rubbish once they've been pumped back into a DAW.

  On 5/13/2015 at 9:33 PM, Leon Sumbitches said:

For me, the trouble lies in getting the cassette-recorded stuff back into the digital realm; things I've mixed on tape often sound great on a decent hi-fi, but rubbish once they've been pumped back into a DAW.

Yea this was the main hurdle i had when i was tempted with experimenting a while back - I felt i'd get some really gnarly sounds recording onto it, but then in the process of bringing it back into the DAW to make a .wav/.mp3 it might degrade too far to a point of losing the benefits?

(especially with the lower-fi cheap tape machines [which paradoxically reap potentially the best results])

found this, tis' quite cringe - but nice to see someone illustrating it for the masses

  On 5/13/2015 at 11:04 PM, TRiP said:

 

  On 5/13/2015 at 9:33 PM, Leon Sumbitches said:

For me, the trouble lies in getting the cassette-recorded stuff back into the digital realm; things I've mixed on tape often sound great on a decent hi-fi, but rubbish once they've been pumped back into a DAW.

 

Yea this was the main hurdle i had when i was tempted with experimenting a while back - I felt i'd get some really gnarly sounds recording onto it, but then in the process of bringing it back into the DAW to make a .wav/.mp3 it might degrade too far to a point of losing the benefits?

This is the issue for me, aye. In fairness, it's possibly my own fault for not having a decent audio interface (when I want to get taped stuff back into my laptop, I just record it into my DAW from the laptop's line in, which probably isn't great quality). It's a shame because I really love some of the tape sounds- it works especially well on big, pillowy 'boofy' Dilla-style kicks, seems to add a nice warmth and softness that's lacking in the DAW.

  On 5/12/2015 at 8:01 AM, psn said:

 

  On 5/12/2015 at 7:42 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

my tape machine's sample rate

Don't touch the DATs.

 

I guess i'm missing something? My tape player records faster than a regular cassette will playback. Is it wrong to call that its sample rate?

'Sample Rate' is more to do with the digital domain, literally how many snippets of a discrete amplitude points per second. It'd be more tape recording speed I guess, usually measured in IPS (inches per second) - it does alter the sound quality but not in the same kind of way as with decreasing sample rate

the best of both worlds is to get a tape player with not so great quality tape heads that has a cue mode AFTER it hits the tape, this way you can actually use a tape recorder dirty effect as a real-time send effect in a DAW. I don't have a tape player that does this but my friend does and makes his stuff sound like its on tape without ever actually having to bounce it and put it back onto the computer. The key is to find a tape player fucked up enough or poor enough heads that it gives you the hiss/distortion/warble that you want, but you're more likely to find this on a low quality/lowend tape recorder. I think some of the nakamichi's have real-time cue mode, but I know very little about tape machines.

  On 5/13/2015 at 11:41 PM, TRiP said:

found this, tis' quite cringe - but nice to see someone illustrating it for the masses

 

Pretty much this.

The thing I like about S-VHS is that you have the "hi-fi" mode, which actually has a surprisingly low noise floor and generally sounds warm and compressed but still pretty clean, but you can also use the standard VHS audio tracks to get much more lo-fi, colored. They'll be harder to find free, but most of them aren't particularly expensive on eBay as long as you don't have to ship it far.

anyone ever tried recording line input to micro cassette?

  On 5/14/2015 at 3:00 AM, John Ehrlichman said:

anyone ever tried recording line input to micro cassette?

I used to, haven't had one that worked in quite a while. They run really slow, so you'll get all of the artifacts you'd expect from a not so good cassette player except more so. Which is usually good.

EDIT: you can also re-record the stuff you dumped to tape by holding the speaker on the cassette recorder up against a guitar pickup and DI-ing that (or even recording it through an amp), if you really want to mangle the sound.

  On 5/14/2015 at 1:09 AM, mcbpete said:

'Sample Rate' is more to do with the digital domain, literally how many snippets of a discrete amplitude points per second. It'd be more tape recording speed I guess, usually measured in IPS (inches per second) - it does alter the sound quality but not in the same kind of way as with decreasing sample rate

Ya, i understand that, didn't have another term to describe that. Just referring that aspect of the machine cuz when you play it at normal speed, it's nicely pitched down

Funny, just yesterday I felt like I wanted to get more musically focused, so I threw all my gear in the closet except my Shruthi-1, Mirage, and Tascam 424.

The 4-track way of working to me is the real beauty of tape, especially with an old sampler that will lend it a little complementary digital grit and make you appreciate the ability to flip the tape over or play it at different speeds for more sampling time. It's so fun to lay stuff down track by track and just fill up a tape with sort of stream-of-consciousness ideas bouncing off each other.

The hiss and shitty frequency response will definitely get to me again at some point, though. But for now it's all about cranking up the bass and volume for that tasty skull-crushing saturation.

Btw does anyone know any places where I can still get some tapes for a reasonable price? Preferably Type II

I've checked tapeline.info but shipping is around 23 euros when I only want to order 10 cassettes.

On ebay some people are selling type IIs, but they're asking 4-6 euros a piece.....

You can just go to thrift stores or garage sales which are usually less than a dollar and record over those

Think i've sorted getting a 6-head Sharp VC-MH75 Hi-Fi VCR for free, have a few "Hi-Definition" blank VHSs, looking forward to testing!

Still interested in getting a smaller X-track cassette model - anyone recommend any in particular, or know what sort of prices I should be aiming for?

found this also, song is rather silly but I recon i'm hearing the benefits, it's smoothing off the precise, clean digital sound:

id reckon you'd get a lot more interesting /noteworthy results by running something hot onto better quality tape like that. When bands rent studio time to record on 2-inch tape, they would almost be wasting their time if they made sure the level never went over 0 during the session. Otherwise you'd just be using tape to get rid of 'digital harshness' which a good mastering engineer would be able to get rid of without using any tape, some engineers can do this using all digital plugins others use a combination of outboard gear and plugins.

  On 5/16/2015 at 1:39 AM, John Ehrlichman said:

id reckon you'd get a lot more interesting /noteworthy results by running something hot onto better quality tape like that. When bands rent studio time to record on 2-inch tape, they would almost be wasting their time if they made sure the level never went over 0 during the session. Otherwise you'd just be using tape to get rid of 'digital harshness' which a good mastering engineer would be able to get rid of without using any tape, some engineers can do this using all digital plugins others use a combination of outboard gear and plugins.

yeah I was gonna say that if someone is willing to put some money into their stuff, there's alot of mastering places with high-end tape machines that run at 7.5ips.

As much as I love lo-fi sound and lo-fi techniques, these days I'm leaning more towards doing that than something like dubbing down to VCR.

(But I do love the sound of VCR...it's common practice over at SP-Forums and it's perfect for the lo-fi boom-bap aesthetic)