Thinking out loud...

[nowaysj]

Wub, if you'd like to work with free hand beats, I CANNOT recommend enough Roland's little samplers. I use an sp404sx... honestly, it is just magic. This shit I come up with in there is totally unmatched in the box. It is without a doubt my favorite piece of hardware. Little fucker gets me really pissed off sometimes too. Let's just say, it has its limitations.

[fragments]

subscribing to this awesome, awesome thread...been getting really into lo-fi, abstract, self-indulgent stuff lately...got cassette dubbing deck and a VHS in the studio now. I've heard that VHS has got some great audio qualities to it. I will have to get off my ass and get my rig all hooked up and routed through my desktop mixer and post some results. I've got the Korg Monotron Delay as well that I want to route up to all of this.

I'll be back with results and thoughts... getting the stink eye from the boss as I type though

[wub]

subscribing to this awesome, awesome thread...been getting really into lo-fi, abstract, self-indulgent stuff lately...got cassette dubbing deck and a VHS in the studio now. I've heard that VHS has got some great audio qualities to it. I will have to get off my ass and get my rig all hooked up and routed through my desktop mixer and post some results. I've got the Korg Monotron Delay as well that I want to route up to all of this.

I'll be back with results and thoughts... getting the stink eye from the boss as I type though

There was a post a couple pages back that had a mix created from/onto VHS tape. I've found a good thread on it from the SP forum, which also ties in to nowaysj' comments;

Wub, if you'd like to work with free hand beats, I CANNOT recommend enough Roland's little samplers. I use an sp404sx... honestly, it is just magic. This shit I come up with in there is totally unmatched in the box. It is without a doubt my favorite piece of hardware. Little fucker gets me really pissed off sometimes too. Let's just say, it has its limitations.

CreateDigitalMusic also has a quality article which looks at VHS within music (and is written by the fire boy KidKameleon).

Also stumbled on a couple of YouTube videos which are an interesting look at the whole process;

[fragments]

Big fucking up Wub...this thread is pure gold...pure gold I tell you! I'd kinda given up on DSF Production until I came across all this...my next day off...totally dedicated to playing with this stuff...

I've actually got a pro S-VHS and a very cheap home VHS at the moment (don't know models, etc right now)...kinda threw up my hands when I couldn't get simple bouncing to work with the S-VHS, but I think I need to look up manual, lots of i/os...it has a jog wheel for quick RW and FF...VHS scratching???

[nowaysj]

Yeah, I have a vhs wired up but it is a mother fuck. It's got to be on the right channel to record, every time I switch of all the power in my rig, it resets its channel, I can't get it back without unpatching it, plugin it into a tv to get the right channel... BUT it does sound awesome, even with hi fi.

[wub]

...it has a jog wheel for quick RW and FF...VHS scratching???

It's certainly possible, as is anything where an analogue medium is being used to playback content...however in my experience (of having a VCR with a jog wheel on it), the audio signal was generally cut when the jog was enabled to prevent blowing TV speakers (which would be quite easy to do with an intense signal like that being run through them).

So may guess would be unless there was a way to override that audio signal cutout, this might be tricky. Alternative is that you take the VCR itself apart and directly manipulate the tape whilst it's in motion to get the wow/flutter effect...but actual scratching I'm not too sure on.


Also going to leave some live jam videos here for various analogue noise generation things;

[Sonika]

always wondered about mixing with tapes and the like, now I have my answer! cool vids

[alphacat]

where this thread's going.

[deadly_habit]

as i recall mixmaster mike got his start on tape decks, scratching, mixing and all

[nowaysj]

Nobody's track from this is really incredible.

[nowaysj]

Incredibly, not made on an sp in anyway:

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[wub]

Continuing on from the Neuro stylings I had blaring out last week, and my sound design session this weekend, found a tutorial from Rockwell on one of his tracks (and a few others);




Chucking in here for later viewing...the whole NeoSignal/Rockwell vibe just makes me want to do Jaeger shots and dance til I wear my shoes out.


Also found this in my travels, don't recall watching it;



That's my evening sorted anyway.

[stevemac]

lost a fucking huge post about my brief experience with tapes, tl;dr they give a nice punch from 100 to 300, not that harsh sounding as digital, don't know about sub bass but you should do it, there's more to music than quality.

Yeah, but at the same time if I lose the sub bass frequencies altogether it would defeat the purpose - sound colouring is all well and good, but not killing it entirely.

Am i being dumb or couldn't you just run a clean and tape run version in parallel in your sequencer. Use an EQ and volume sliders to make them sit nicely together?

EDIT: And whilst you're there, a heavily compressed version running in parallel as well

[wub]

lost a fucking huge post about my brief experience with tapes, tl;dr they give a nice punch from 100 to 300, not that harsh sounding as digital, don't know about sub bass but you should do it, there's more to music than quality.

Yeah, but at the same time if I lose the sub bass frequencies altogether it would defeat the purpose - sound colouring is all well and good, but not killing it entirely.

Am i being dumb or couldn't you just run a clean and tape run version in parallel in your sequencer. Use an EQ and volume sliders to make them sit nicely together?

EDIT: And whilst you're there, a heavily compressed version running in parallel as well

I'm referring to tape as an actual release medium as opposed to just a colouration tool.

[nowaysj]

Am told that bass records better at slow speeds, and highs record better at fast speeds. Change the sample rate of your song to 22.5k, but don't resample it, play it out at half speed to a tape recording at half speed. Jokes, no don't do this.

If you're worried about like hi fidelity recordings, cassette tape is not the medium for you.

[wub]

Am told that bass records better at slow speeds, and highs record better at fast speeds. Change the sample rate of your song to 22.5k, but don't resample it, play it out at half speed to a tape recording at half speed. Jokes, no don't do this.

If you're worried about like hi fidelity recordings, cassette tape is not the medium for you.

Alphacat touched on this a couple of pages back;

On cassettes, absolutely. Subs at normal recording/playback speeds definitely take a hit.

HOWEVER...

Record it at double speed and then pitch it down half and there they are, but with a lot more noise too.

And in terms of the hi fidelity, I wouldn't say anything discussed in this thread so far would really benefit from the crystal clarity approach to things. I'm after lo-fi...that's kinda the point. In terms of cassette as a release medium, this is geared more toward my 'mixtape' concept that kicked things off.

Couple of 45min mixes processed in FL or whatever, then bounced to WAV and duplicated to cassette. Actually medium that can be touched and makes a cool rattle when you shake it. But this is digression at best for such an early hour. I even remember a night I played at in Cape Town a few years back where the flyer was a cassette case inlay, and if you presented it at the door you got discount entry and a copy of the mixtape that accompanied it, so you could fold the flyer up and make it into the case.

Dubstep for me is almost becoming too singular in it's methodology. The vinyl aspect of the scene aside, it's reliance on overly digital methods for both creation and delivery is becoming a bit sterile to me. I want something different. We have digital radio station called www.somethingsomethingFM.com which don't actually broadcast other than over the Internet, digital emulation of distortion and tape emulation instead of getting a junk unit and spending a bit of time, promo mixes labelled 'mix tapes' when in fact they don't exist in a tangible format.

It all focusses down onto some boring singularity. Not talking about the homogenisation of the sound itself, there will always be enough variation in the product to keep me and my ears interested, but the delivery method just bugs the shit out of me. I don't see (or at least, have exposure to) enough variety on that front. And that saddens me, to the point I want to make a personal change to things.

[Mad_EP]

RE: scratching with tapes?

This guy is my hero....

[nowaysj]

Wub: Business before pleasure: I have been told by recording engineers that bass reproduces better at SLOW speeds. Alpha is suggesting double speed recording, I'm suggesting half speed recording. I haven't tried this, so I can't say. And perhaps I've misunderstood what I've been told.

Pleasure: (no business first, again, can we get that little thinking emoticon guy on the first page of emoticons, maybe that is what we are lacking around here!) Didn't know it was so much about the distribution side, this lofi/tape thing for you. Paramount amongst my considerations is production, and I kind of get tunnel visioned there. Digital is a terminal medium, yeah? In my life I've seen many destination formats, from vinyl, reel to reel, 8 track, cassette, cd and now digi downloads. But digi downloads definitely seems like it is the terminal solution.

But you're rejecting tape because of the poor bass translation? I don't know man, use a tilt eq, drop the highs a bit into the noise floor, and keep the bass loud and proud going into tape? Just deal with the loss?

I'm way more concerned with tape in the production process. My goal is to run my hardware sound sources into a mixer and into a tape recorder of some sorts (almost got a 1/2 otari 2 track recently, could you imagine the saturation on that??!!), in live jam kind of conditions. OR, just recording phrases, beats, sounds to tape, then collaging in the fl playlist. Still need the mixer and the tape recorder... seems like a long way to go now... I'm also about to start selling off bits of gear, I hope that I can get some things recorded before everything is gone.

[Lucifa]

posting for future reference of them tutorials

[wub]

Some more tape flavoured notes collected from other sources;

I got a question for you people rocking tapes...I noticed on one tune I recorded to tape, it had some low frequencies that were almost inaudible, at least on my cans (Denon DN-HP1000). However, when I recorded it just a little hot to my tape deck, it got some really cool saturation and overdrive effects, almost sounded like the tape was falling apart as it played.

My question is...does anyone know the technical side to get this kind of effect in purpose? For instance, I was hoping I could run a square wave so low, that it's essentially a DC offset at a volume that would 'hurt' the entire sound rhythmically...is that possible? Also, would sine wave do it better? And what frequencies can I run in there that won't actually reproduce any bass but still destroy the audio and what volume ratios between the 'clean' audio and the 'sledgehammer' audio is best to achieve a good effect?

Any help is appreciate. I'm somewhat of a layman in terms of tape shit, so I'm trying to learn here. Thanks!

Ive done this with software. I side-chained extrememly low frequency sine wave samples to the main sample bus, so you had pumping but with no kick.

When you slam to tape (record in the red), the natural material of the tape works as a compressor. So, just as you would use vinyl sim compression, the tape will allow quieter elements to be louder, but have the loudest elements occupy the headroom when they hit (in this case the sub-sonic frequencies).

I suppose you could generate a sine wave on the computer, use a low pass filter to get rid of the audible spectrum of the sine wave (leaving maybe 40 HZ and lower). Sine wav is the best, because it has the least harmonics.

Theoretically zero harmonics, no?

Another semi-relevant detail is how tape speed affects low-end and harmonic content.

Theoretically--once again--higher frequencies are better represented at faster speeds, and lower frequencies at slower speeds. So if you somehow wanted to represent a bass that went down to 1hz--way past the human hearing capacity, obviously--but having a tape going INSANELY slow would be your best bet.

So it seems it would follow that the harmonic excitement of tape saturation would benefit from the highest possible speed. You know, for any of you SUPER lo-fi guys that record slow.

Also this as it's fiyah;

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