Can someone give me advice on using tape to get a warm analogue sound on various instruments?
I'm currently clueless on what to buy; would a small tape deck such as a Dictaphone work or would I need a proper tape reel?
Also what sort of tape should I buy, does it need to be expensive magnetic tape if I'm looking for sound degradation?
Any other tips would be fantastic.
Cheers.
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 9:30 pm
by deadly_habit
different recorders will give you diff sounds, also it depends on how much you drive the input for effect on the tape
there are uses for fresh virgin hq tape and tuned up and cleaned tape heads vs dirty cheap or been recorded on multiple times
peep the last page of this months tape op called four tracks and an attitude
it focuses on the tascam 424
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 9:36 pm
by 3za
Depends on your budget, and what sort of sound your looking for?
I use a nasty sony cassette deck, and It proper lofi just fucks stuff up.
Tips run your stuff hot, record some silents to help with noise removal later.
Every thing in this track got, some nasty tape love, listen to them hi-hats they got fucked (I can mixs better than this btw) Soundcloud
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 9:40 pm
by deadly_habit
hit up a thrift store first and see what they have
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 9:43 pm
by Assassin
3za wrote:Depends on your budget, and what sort of sound your looking for?
I use a nasty sony cassette deck, and It proper lofi just fucks stuff up.
Tips run your stuff hot, record some silents to help with noise removal later.
Every thing in this track got, some nasty tape love, listen to them hi-hats they got fucked (I can mixs better than this btw) Soundcloud
I want a deck I can have a lot of grit with or just add some subtle warmth, depending on how I treat it.
Perhaps it would be better to have two. One to hammer the sound and one to just add slight grit.
I have a 100-200 budget.
Cheers for that forum deadly, It's awesome.
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 10:06 pm
by 3za
Assassin wrote:
I have a 100-200 budget.
What currency we talking?
But like deadly said, might want to start looking at the bottom of the barrel.
Quid. I've found a couple of dictaphone style things. I'm assuming it'll need an input and output?
Yeah
Are them dictaphones using DAT tapes by any chance? because they won't give you much warmth, or colour.
Could you recommend something to me?
Revox and, Nakamichi are ment to be the bee's knees for cassette deck, but I have never used them. I have used a 70's technics cassette deck, which had lots of wow, and flutter, ans sound pretty warm. I have also used a panasonic from the 90's that just sort of rolled of highs and lows, and had a little wow, and flutter going on. But my favorite one I have used is my early 00's sony, It just destroys any thing you run through it. Never used a reel to reel, but heard Akai, and revox make good ones. But If I was you I would look for the cheapest used cassette deck I could find, and see how it goes.
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 11:01 pm
by thor_beatz
It's in Dutch. See translation in comments
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 11:04 pm
by alphacat
+1 on re-amping drum submixes via tape!!! Nothing comes close, and for the most part any frequency loss is irrelevant anyway since it's usually in the 12 kHz range and higher. This is actually a "secret" that many big name producers use.
Old Jensen, JVC, Pioneer cassette decks are wonderful because of their amp circuitry, which was designed for the audiophiles of the late 70's. You can run 'em hot as fuck with barely any overload... but analog distortion (unlike digital distortion from running in the red) is a nice and sometimes desirable effect, so even when it does happen it's not always bad.
You can find some old models (Denon had some) with XLR in/outs, which would be pretty ideal if you could find one in the price range you're able to pay.
Stay away from dictaphones IMHO. They're only designed to comfortably handle the freq/dynamic range of a person's speaking voice, which is hardly in the same range as something like a drumkit.
Finally, as much as it may sound counterintuitive - stay away from reel-to-reels unless you really know what you're doing because they usually need a lot more babysitting (calibration, azimuth correction, etc.) - plus it's impossible/expensive as hell to find decent quality tape these days.
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 11:16 pm
by Assassin
Cheers people I'll check it all out.
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 3:35 am
by bum robot
deadly habit wrote:different recorders will give you diff sounds, also it depends on how much you drive the input for effect on the tape
there are uses for fresh virgin hq tape and tuned up and cleaned tape heads vs dirty cheap or been recorded on multiple times
peep the last page of this months tape op called four tracks and an attitude
it focuses on the tascam 424
yes that article was choice, tape op is the shit for being free
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 4:30 am
by MUT3
sup guise
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 2:14 am
by staticcast
double post
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 2:29 am
by staticcast
Tape is great for taming peaks. Live drums, recorded with no compression, straight to tape - it fattens up the sound and glues everything together. As a mixdown tool I find it works much better on individual channels than on everything as a whole; the effect can be quite subtle but when it's all summed together it has a "glueing" effect that can make everything sit together a lo nicer. On compressed audio (as in less dynamic range, not mp3) I find it's less effective unless you really want to drive stuff into saturation. If that's what you're after then bear in mind that if you really hit the tape hard then past a certain point it will be the record amplifier, and not the tape, that's saturating. This might still sound good - but it's not tape saturation anymore. On my A77 you actually clip the record amplifier before you hit the absolute saturation point on the tape, though you do get a fair bit of soft saturation before then (and of course the saturation curve depends to a large extent on the tape itself).
(By the way, for anyone interested in the geeky stuff, if you're dealing with a decent quality machine, the signal flow is basically just:
IN ---> input EQ -----> static saturation curve ---> output EQ----> OUT
There's not much magic to it. Of course, there's all of the imperfections, the noise, dropouts, wow, flutter etc, but the "tape saturation" itself is really just pre- and post-emphasis EQ curves, with the right shape of saturation curve in the middle. If you see a tape emulation VST that has a built-in compressor and limiter, run a mile. Tape doesn't work like that.)
alphacat wrote:Finally, as much as it may sound counterintuitive - stay away from reel-to-reels unless you really know what you're doing because they usually need a lot more babysitting (calibration, azimuth correction, etc.) - plus it's impossible/expensive as hell to find decent quality tape these days.
I'm gonna have to disagree here - find a Revox (A77/B77) in decent condition and it won't need very much maintenance at all. They're not that expensive either; I got my B77 for about 200 euros and an A77 is cheaper still. Tape is about a tenner for a small Trident reel, and you only really need one reel of the stuff unless you're actually archiving stuff onto tape.
(Also, reel-to-reels are fucking sexy. No lie.)
The thing about cassette is that it generally sounds like ass. Not always, of course, but for the money you'd pay for a very good cassette recorder you may as well get a reel-to-reel, where you can always go lower-fi if you want by using shitty tape at 3.25 instead of 7.5 IPS. The frequency response of cassette tape sucks, meaning you can't really bounce anything with lots of high end to it without it coming out sounding like mud, which isn't so much the case with reel-to-reel at 7.5 ips (though I still wouldn't master anything onto tape at less than 15 ips unless I really were going for a lo-fi effect). Of course, if you want real lo-fi, just get an old walkman and be done with it.
The other nice thing about reel to reels is that they almost invariably have separate record and read heads, which means that with some clever DAW routing you can feed them back and use them for real tape echo. You can do this with certain cassette recorders but they're in the minority; make sure you check before you buy. This is one of my favourite things to do with tape. On your DAW you can add shit within the feedback loop to make things really interesting - simple stuff like EQ (filter delay), simple delay (to change the delay time) - but also reverb (to fade into wash), compression (wall of sound) or whatever you want. You can get some crazy effects like this, although it does have a tendency to degenerate quite rapidly into mindless noise if you're not careful.
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 9:15 am
by nowaysj
Am in the market for reel to reel in the bay area. I'm majorly budget minded, but am looking for a fully functional device. Hit me up if you ever get any leads. THX
Re: Using tape as an effect
Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 9:25 am
by gravity
static_cast wrote:
I'm gonna have to disagree here - find a Revox (A77/B77) in decent condition and it won't need very much maintenance at all. They're not that expensive either; I got my B77 for about 200 euros and an A77 is cheaper still. Tape is about a tenner for a small Trident reel, and you only really need one reel of the stuff unless you're actually archiving stuff onto tape.
(Also, reel-to-reels are fucking sexy. No lie.)
The thing about cassette is that it generally sounds like ass. Not always, of course, but for the money you'd pay for a very good cassette recorder you may as well get a reel-to-reel, where you can always go lower-fi if you want by using shitty tape at 3.25 instead of 7.5 IPS. The frequency response of cassette tape sucks, meaning you can't really bounce anything with lots of high end to it without it coming out sounding like mud, which isn't so much the case with reel-to-reel at 7.5 ips (though I still wouldn't master anything onto tape at less than 15 ips unless I really were going for a lo-fi effect). Of course, if you want real lo-fi, just get an old walkman and be done with it.
agree here, as long as you get one thats in good condition and maintain it (i.e. clean it with isopropyl alcohol and demagnetize it every now and then) it should be fine. if you really have to calibrate it you can find out how on the web with very little effort. i fucking love my reel to reel.
The other nice thing about reel to reels is that they almost invariably have separate record and read heads, which means that with some clever DAW routing you can feed them back and use them for real tape echo. You can do this with certain cassette recorders but they're in the minority; make sure you check before you buy. This is one of my favourite things to do with tape. On your DAW you can add shit within the feedback loop to make things really interesting - simple stuff like EQ (filter delay), simple delay (to change the delay time) - but also reverb (to fade into wash), compression (wall of sound) or whatever you want. You can get some crazy effects like this, although it does have a tendency to degenerate quite rapidly into mindless noise if you're not careful.
