Analog Distortion on a Budget – Cassette Overdrive Technique

[fragments]

would it sound better if you ran your finished mixdown through this pre-mastering or whatever or if you did each track individually?

never done anything like this before

Try both, but with a lofi setup like this I'm guessing running your master through it wouldn't get what you are looking for. Additionally, I don't know how much machine noise anyone might get, but if you do all your tracks it could add up to a mess. Experiment. I'm guessing with old second hand store machines the conditions of the machines are going to affect the sound and vary at least some.

[skimpi]

well if you want the effect of the video, you would have to do the master, or multiple things together, cos a big part of the sound is the pumping of the background noise you get when driving it all.

I just wanna do some raw jams like this shit

[test_recordings]

How expensive is it to switch to reel to reel and an analog mixer? Second hand obv.

It's the one hardware thing I wanna get into. Do most of my mixing in my DAW, bus those down to leads/effects/bas/drums into mixer, overdrive it slightly and do some last minute cleaning up after it's saturated and record the whole thing to tape.

Reel to reel can cost a fucking bomb for a guaranteed investment... you have to be aware of people advertising them as 'working' when they just pressed play to make the reels move! Probably anything that hasn't been recently serviced will need to be serviced and that costs time, money, effort to find a techician... I do know one DnB producer that recorded to cassette then sampled it back, but he made shitty jump up so I'm not sure how well it worked!

I would actually recommend investing in a valve compressor for the final mix if you want to have depth and warmth, or mixing if you don't mind having to re-amp every time you want to edit. You could also just get your tracks mastered through analogue equipment to save hassle.

However, the producer Bass Clef uses all analogue equipment to make tracks for mixing (don't know if he records to tape though). If you were going to record to tape using sequencing equipment, you'd have to get a tape deck which syncs to midi somehow (which is pretty fucking hard, though not impossible) - otherwise everything is 'live' and it's harder to punch machines in and out on a dance track without possibly knocking the swing off-kilter (humans can correct themselves on the fly but do you ever hear people mixing jazz?).

It's something I'm interested in but I'd rather go the Bass Clef route and use analogue equipment to start with since it's way more powerful digitalising analogue than analogising digital...

[wub]

Bass Clef Interview - rollercoasters of the heart - http://tape-echo.com/interviews/bass-cl ... the-heart/

[test_recordings]

Nice, his output actually sounds pretty well moulded together as well so it might be from licking the tape with bass and stuff.

I actually had a 4 track cassette recorder as well but it needed servicing because two heads didn't record... damn, forgot that! Once tried to record a drum machine and synth to it and only got the synth part

[fluff]

Rather than use this approach I'd have though it would be better to track down a higher spec cassette deck with separate recording and monitoring heads so you can get the Tape compression.

[Sharmaji]

Reel to reel can cost a fucking bomb for a guaranteed investment
I would actually recommend investing in a valve compressor

a quality 8-channel reel-to-reel tape deck is gonna cost at least $500 or so on ebay. The one i have, which barely works and needs a ton of TLC, is still worth about $250.

plus tape, cables, etc ,etc.

add a decent mixer at a few hundred dollars, plus a snake, plus the 8/16/24 channels of high-quality I/O and you're looking at a very large investment for something to mix to. If you're tracking rock drums and really need the tape, and have clients who'll pay for your gear and expertise-- sure.

mixing into a tube compressor can do as much bad stuff to a mix as good. I did some mix tweaks for a buddy who'd spent a fortune on a stereo tube compressor and insisted on running all of his mixes through it... so excited to use it that he over-comrpessed everything and, in the end, we went with the uncompressed mixes.

Just because you have the gear doesn't mean it's the right thing to use on a particular project.
(with that said, if an API 2500 fell out of the sky, i wouldn't pass it up.)

if you really, really, really want the sound of tape-- a bit of compression, some harmonic interaction, some loss of extreme high and low end-- and you really want to do it via hardware...




get a fatso.


or this neve box.

[wolf89]

Definitely trying this with my Tempest at some point when I want to make some gnarly techno

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I've been eyeball fucking that neve box since I found out they exist. I'll probably never spend 1,200 for one...I'd sooner try out UAD and their Ampex emulation. I've had some pretty good success recently with a tube pre-amp and overdrive pedal and a JoeMeek box. I think I spent >400 for both of them combined. I find a combo of hardware and analog emulation can get a pretty nice sound.