Mixing down to 1/4 inch tape.

[elektro80]

Ah... right.. that is the same deck? He probably read this thread and researched this further.

That price is in fact OK if the unit is in excellent condition - which means it must have been recently serviced. The list of the parts that have to be in near new condition is long.. in order to justify that price.

[KarmanHardon]

I won't miss the next one I come across, if it ever happens.

Here are some nice(r) pics I just took...

[KarmanHardon]

I found a guy that knows his stuff... about 65 years old and what a character! Phew!!!


He doesn't have a website... and his shop is quite hard to find. When I went in, I knew I had found a good place.

''-Hi... I'm looking for...
-What's your name?
-Thomas.
-That's impossible!!!
-er... what...?
-your name cannot be Thomas
-uh... ok why?
-Because it's MY name!! Hehehehehe. Please sit down Thomas... if you
're in a hurry, come back some other time.''
A very... how to say... ''take-no-shit'' kind of man.

Anyway... we talked for an hour and I bought a hub adapter. He knows every little detail about my machine (it looks like he's got every spare part too). At the end he said ''OK... I have a gift for you Thomas because you're a nice guy and you have a nice name...hehehe.'' and he gave me a bottle of head lubricant and some 406 tape he had in his basement for a while (wich turned out being ok).

[mosc]

Wow, a lucky find.

If he is willing, have him tune your machine and bring it up to specs. My guess is he'll bring it up way above specs. I knew a great tape recorder tech when I lived in Oakland. His name was Don Helmholtz. He could make Tascams and Revoxes sound MUCH better than new. It was amazing.

IMHO, a good tape recorder tech is just as important as a good piano tech, if you catch my drift.

[KarmanHardon]

Absolutely!



There is only one thing "wrong"... I get a accentuation, a bump at between 14 and 16 khz, of a bit more than 2 db. Turning the speed down a tiny bit fixes that however.It's otherwise perfect sounding with 456 tape. The bass is fabulous. I did another mix yesterday, drove the tape quite hard this time and...and... oh I love it. Even using a part of the tape that I've recorded on many times provides something interesting, I found.

I found about a company called RMGI that picked things up where BASF left them (excellent!!). They make this SM911 tape that is supposed to be a more-than-perfect replacement for 456. I'll have to try a reel of that stuff before I take my deck to dr. Ungerleider.

[mosc]

Right on. Get him to tune the machine for the tape you wish to use.

[bachus]

for when you run out of tape deck techs vtape

[KarmanHardon]

[bachus]

[KarmanHardon]

I tried making a beat with pieces of tape, just to try...
I never thought I could suck so bad at something. It was fun though. My inaptitude to do it right gave the beat an odd feel...then the loop snapped and wrapped itself around the capstan.

This is really hard work. It requires much dexterity and concentration, talent. I BET doing it for someone else was incredibly dull work. I hope it paid ok.

....

My latest find: I made myself a sampler patch made with one flute tone from the tape that I played back at different speeds. It sounds extremely eerie. It gives chills.

[bachus]

[KarmanHardon]

Hi!


Hey does anyone have a nifty genius trick/technique to easily straighten reel flanges?


Btw... I just got a second near-mint B77 mkII, a high speed version this time. It was just aligned and I'm currently using it to mix down an ep that will be released sometime in march. The funny thing here is that it was aligned for SM900, but I find the music sounds punchier with some old quantegy 406 when driving the tape. I love what it does to the subs.

[EdisonRex]

[KarmanHardon]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Epbfdkpw1Y



That one was a hell of a lot of work.

[EdisonRex]

A little low on the YouTube audio level, but it sounded rather good.

[KarmanHardon]

Youtube also mono'd it... and now I hear I forgot to "mono-check" one of the instruments and it's half as effective in mono...gnnshhh.. oh well too late now. Won't forget next time. Goddamn.

I shamelessly overcompressed the mix with a dbx mc-6 compressor I got not too long ago for forty bucks. I'm in love with the little bastard and feel blessed to have stumbled upon it. It sounds really... exciting.

[livingnote]

What a cool thread! I've had my Studer sitting around for a while now, and now I finally got around to getting my Telcom to work the way I wanted it.

I first got into tape when I plugged into my dad's old Grundig tube tape machine and that thing did stuff to my digital recording like I'd never heard, then I took it to my friend's all-digital studio and he went nuts. Then I got my paws on a revox A77 and couldn't believe how crisp and precise the sound was coming off that machine. In the meantime I have a b67 which as far as I know is the pro-level version of the A700, really nice thing. One of the great things about Tape is that it can really sweeten up screechy highs, especially in the classical department, all those violins can easily add up to Katzenjammer and if you run it through tape the hysteresis (or so I was told) nicely rounds off that top end...and telcom just rocks

[mosc]

I'm glad to see all this enthusiasm for the old tape machines. True, you can get fabulous recordings from them. They are very forgiving if your signal levels get too strong, and the color of the sound can be warm and silky. Just using some of the later model pro recorders is a kick because they are such fabulous examples of electro-mechanical engineering.

Just a few words of caution. 99% of my music was recorded on tape. I speak from experience. (The famous North Florida philosopher, Jedadiah Jones (Gamble Rogers) once said, "Experience is what you get, when you don't get what you want".)

I suggest you look at it as a processing method. At least copy your final mixes, what we used to call called masters, to digital before you finish your projects. Probably the most tragic thing about tape is that is doesn't age well. Tapes don't even sound the same when you play them back on a different machine, even if it's the same brand and model.

Every time you play them you change them is some subtle ways. This is because residual magnetism on the tape guides and heads tends to erase the tape. This is why careful people would clean and demagnetize the heads and guides before every session. Be careful to store your tapes away from your machines so this demag process doesn't erase your recordings by accident.

Be careful with sudden starts, stops, rewind and fast forward; you can stretch the tape. The top-end machines had logic that made this not so much a problem, but the cheaper machines can really make a mess of your tapes if you aren't careful. Every time you push one of the tape transport buttons you are putting stress on your tape. This is not to mean you never use them, of course, just be aware of what's happening and be careful.

There is a print through problem that can really be disastrous. Always store your tapes tails-out. That is, don't rewind after playing - rewind before playing. This way, the print through will always be on tape with sound recorded on it and print through won't be noticeable. It's good to use white leader on the beginning of a track and red leader on the end. That way you can easily tell the tail. Some people say that because tails-out storage has a tighter roll the tape will last longer too.

Following these tricks of the trade will make your use of tape machines more enjoyable.

[livingnote]

Cool that you know about this stuff! I've been more or less just experimenting with tape but in the meantime rely on it for mixes, and it's great to hear people talk who've been there.

As far as I remember, there was this test on recordproduction.com where they recorded to a Studer A800 and some digital stuff. They then did a blind test with producers/engineers to see if analog tape really did sound better...I of course expected them all to say "it's definitely b, analog-you can hear that a mile away" and what comes out? Analog definitely is in there, but Radar had them fascinated too, taste aside it was very ambiguous all the way through. So I went "whoa" and it somehow makes sense too, for pure clear recording it seems converters can really hack it these days, but as a signal stuff-doer-wither dat ole tape's da shiznit.

Just last week my converters went nuts on me but kept putting out to the monitors happily and I didn't even notice...I was glad I at least had it on tape and could go on mixing.

After reading what's in here, I think I'm gonna get me another Telcom so I can record back from the tape into the converter right as it's being recorded. That way I don't have to worry about losing the recording if there's a digital drop-out and it's a direct transfer.
And while I'm at it, I'm gonna try letting the tape run during the mixdown and monitor off the playback head...I can imagine that way you can really get into the feel of how it reacts.

By the way, how does storing the tape tail out reduce print-through? I take it from you 100% but I somehow can't get my head around it

All the best, Lukas

[seraph]

[livingnote]

Ah great, thanks for that

Funny I was just talking to a friend on the old topic analog vs. digital and there were some interesting things that came out. One of the funniest things about digital seems to be that no matter what you do, you cannot add power to a signal in the digital domain, you can only change its theoretic appearance by phase shifts and whatnot. This brings in another strange implication: If you use stuff that colors like vintage preamps and analog eqs before going digital, you introduce a lot of phase stuff to begin with and that wreaks havoc when applied to digital summing and processing, especially if a mix is 20 tracks or more. A digital eq trying to process a signal with phase shifts in it by means of phase shifts will not be able to work to specs per se, in analog you don't really have this problem because you just add or remove power to or from a band.

Which kinda translates to the theory that if you're going to work digital, it is best to record as clean and neutral a signal as possible so that the digital stuff has a clean, correct-phase slate to work on. This also could explain why sometimes, the more you mix in digital, the less total power comes out in the end because everything is somehow cancelling everything out.

Tape, in this matter, is a lot more forgiving as a medium, smoothing out the phase stuff as it records, and therefore it's no wonder almost everyone who tries it loves it. It's like a cleaner-upper for the signal mess digital makes.

I guess that even at this level of digital development one can safely assert that in an ideal situation, one would have digital recording and playback and all the signal processing analog with a tape machine in there somewhere.

[mosc]

I'm not sure I agree with you about the problems with digital, but let's not get into that now - unless you really want to. You like tape so use it. Don't worry about the electrical engineering aspects.

Anyway, for whatever reason, print through is less is you store tails-out. But think about this. If you have a recording of just a single tone burst of say 10 sec. If stored heads out, the silent part at the beginning of the tone burst will lie next to the start of the tone burst. If there is print though, you will hear it as a pre-echo. If, on the other hand, you store it tails out, that ending of the burst will be next to the silent ending of the recording. You'll still get print though, but it won't be as objectionable as a real echo. So the conventional wisdom goes at least.

In any case, a tight roll is considered better because there is much less tape to tape movement caused by temperature changes and such.

It is really standard practice. In the tape days, if you sent someone a demo tape heads-out, they would think you were a boob and probably not even play the tape.

Funny story: in the 70s I had a radio program on KPFA in Berkeley called Thin Aire. Someone sent me a tape of his electronic music. I put it on the tape machine, rewound it and listened. The leader at the front and back was white. Great stuff, I thought. I played the entire composition (about 30 min) on the show. The guy calls me up really really pissed.

"You idiot, you played my composition backwards".

"You mean you sent it heads out?"

"Yes, I guess so. Isn't that OK?"

Well, I explained the standard tails-out practice in radio and got on the air and explained that the composition was played backwards by mistake. A couple of weeks later I played it again in the correct direction. I told the guy I would play it that way on the air if he wanted, but I thought it sounded better backwards. (He had called me an idiot already, so I didn't feel too keen on protecting his ego. I'm a kinder and gentler mosc nowadays). He was miffed by my comment, but asked me to play it correctly, which I did.

[livingnote]

Ah ok, that makes sense...I'm going on ebay to get me some leader tape in that case

And good to know if I'm off when I talk about digital. This was just something I had been talking about and in this case I must have understood it just half-way. This is a tape thread and I really don't want to shove things OT about this versus that. That said, I'm certainly happy when you can tell me if I'm off, music production is so full of half-truths and I don't want to add to the pile without realizing it

But playing the guy's thing backward, how cool is that?

Thanks for the input and see you,

Lukas

[EdisonRex]

Howard, that's a really good story.

[mosc]

Funny. I am not called an 'idiot" all that often, but I remember very clearly like it was yesterday every time that has happened. Must be human nature.