Tape.

SEANSTATIC wrote:have you ever ran a mixed down beat on your computer through your R2R, and then run it back into your computer? what would be the positive and negative doing this?

Yes, I do this sometimes. Not a finalized mixed beat, but often a good bit of the track at least, like all the percussion, or the percussion and bass, or just the vocals. Depends on the track of course. Bouncing to tape colours and mixes the instruments together in a very natural way. It adds a tone, hiss, dirt, and a slightly unfocussed softness to everything. It often helps the percussion gel together. The downsides are that if you run the signal hot, the bass will start to saturate and overpower the rest, even before the 'nice' saturation and compression of the mid and highs kicks in, and also that the highs in the track get reduced, often a bit too severely. EQing before and after can help work with these issues.

Send me a few bars of something you've made, and I'll run it to tape for you at different levels, so you can get an idea of the results.

innovine wrote:

SEANSTATIC wrote:have you ever ran a mixed down beat on your computer through your R2R, and then run it back into your computer? what would be the positive and negative doing this?

Yes, I do this sometimes. Not a finalized mixed beat, but often a good bit of the track at least, like all the percussion, or the percussion and bass, or just the vocals. Depends on the track of course. Bouncing to tape colours and mixes the instruments together in a very natural way. It adds a tone, hiss, dirt, and a slightly unfocussed softness to everything. It often helps the percussion gel together. The downsides are that if you run the signal hot, the bass will start to saturate and overpower the rest, even before the 'nice' saturation and compression of the mid and highs kicks in, and also that the highs in the track get reduced, often a bit too severely. EQing before and after can help work with these issues.

Send me a few bars of something you've made, and I'll run it to tape for you at different levels, so you can get an idea of the results.

The highs will only get softened depending on the tape you're using, and at which speed you're running the machine. Oh, and speaking of EQ, something I like to do is whenever I'd run my mixes through cassette, I'd find the dominating frequency that's flattening/drowning the mix, and then I'll go back to the original track and raise those frequencies before putting it onto tape. Then after the mix is done, I look back at my EQ and subtract exactly what I added to the original, that way you get that tape sound without any additive noise. Also, adding some compression to the original track can help reduce some of the noise.

Great thread, makes me wanna pull out my casette player and **** around some.
Maybe i will try some of these tricks out tonight!

I was thinkin tho, ive got a sample ive sampled in 45 rpm, should i let that go through the tape recorder at 45rpm+8% or pitch it down to intended speed in the s950 and then record? Option 2 will result in a huge loss of memory but wont option 1 dist "wrong" parts?

I guess ill just have to try it out and see what happens.

SEANSTATIC wrote:have you ever ran a mixed down beat on your computer through your R2R, and then run it back into your computer? what would be the positive and negative doing this? or do you simply use it to resample drums? Ive been tossing around the idea of getting a R2R because I want to gully up my beats and I just wanted to know what the deal is with everything

If you want to "gully up" your beats, tape is maybe not the right thing. A good reel to reel that is serviced and has still good tape heads and you're using new tape... it will not gully up the sound. It sounds very clean. You get tape compression however, which sounds great.

From my personal experience, as well speaking about good condition and serviced reel to reel... highs will not get lost, the tape rather is boosting the high frequencies.

marrelarre wrote:Great thread, makes me wanna pull out my casette player and **** around some.
Maybe i will try some of these tricks out tonight!

I was thinkin tho, ive got a sample ive sampled in 45 rpm, should i let that go through the tape recorder at 45rpm+8% or pitch it down to intended speed in the s950 and then record? Option 2 will result in a huge loss of memory but wont option 1 dist "wrong" parts?

I guess ill just have to try it out and see what happens.

If you slow down something you've put on tape, it will increase the hiss. Instead of doing that, just run your sample at normal speed, and record the signal hot. That way, you get that nice tape distortion and punch.

For best quality tape, its best to play the samples normal and record to tape at a high speed. Of course, not every cassette recorder has adjustable speed but they exist.

Ill-Green wrote:For best quality tape, its best to play the samples normal and record to tape at a high speed. Of course, not every cassette recorder has adjustable speed but they exist.

Bouncing off of this, another variation is to pitch your sample down, and then record that to tape at the normal speed, and then pitch up the sample on the recorder (provided it has a pitch control).

If you slow down something you've put on tape, it will increase the hiss. Instead of doing that, just run your sample at normal speed, and record the signal hot. That way, you get that nice tape distortion and punch.[/quote]

Ill loose too much memory running it at normal time if im sampling it back into the MPC :/

Ive recorded whole beats into it, i guess i could do that after next track is done.

Tape is awesome, but it also sucks dick. Hard to explain, been using it for years here and there. It's a love hate thing. It sounds great in some ways, but you trade a lot off. Only really a viable option for individual samples, apply a fade out on each sample and the noise can become negligible. (Talking about r2r, not all tape). I mean litterally every choice is a trade off, and it usually involves noise.

m56p87 wrote:Tape is awesome, but it also sucks dick. Hard to explain, been using it for years here and there. It's a love hate thing. It sounds great in some ways, but you trade a lot off. Only really a viable option for individual samples, apply a fade out on each sample and the noise can become negligible. (Talking about r2r, not all tape). I mean litterally every choice is a trade off, and it usually involves noise.

Noise is inevitable. You can reduce it by recording your signals louder, but there's still going to be some sort of hiss. Another thing to take into consideration is what type of machine you're using, and at what speed you're recording. Some machines tend to be noisier than others. Also, clean heads are important!!!!!!!! I can't stress that enough.

bearhead wrote:

m56p87 wrote:Tape is awesome, but it also sucks dick. Hard to explain, been using it for years here and there. It's a love hate thing. It sounds great in some ways, but you trade a lot off. Only really a viable option for individual samples, apply a fade out on each sample and the noise can become negligible. (Talking about r2r, not all tape). I mean litterally every choice is a trade off, and it usually involves noise.

Noise is inevitable. You can reduce it by recording your signals louder, but there's still going to be some sort of hiss. Another thing to take into consideration is what type of machine you're using, and at what speed you're recording. Some machines tend to be noisier than others. Also, clean heads are important!!!!!!!! I can't stress that enough.

Your preaching to the choir here man.... I say its a trade off for that exact reason. You can record your signals louder sure, but you loose definition and dynamic range. Tape already sounds saturated enough to me I don't want to loose even more depth. Yet another trade off is tape speeds, sure you could get better noise with a lower speed but then you once again loose definition and all your high frequencies. Turning a nice mastered track into lofi audio soup of saturated mids. With tape, everything is a trade off.

in my limited experience with tape on a 4 track 1/4" otari, unless you have a 1/2" ATR mastering deck, or a Revox pro sumer 2-track with a nice new reel of tape, bouncing an entire ITB mix to tape sounds terrible. tracking vocals, lo-fi sh!tty samples from an sp-202, or even bouncing drum sub-mixes from an EXS 24 sampler kit then chopping them up and making "tape" kits sounds great. hitting the tape hard enough to get a good signal to noise ratio but not so hard that you lose dynamics, etc., is working best for me.

like others have said, tracking individual elements to tape first works best. bouncing whole ITB mixes kinda stinks. by all means experiment with everything, but that's sort of my rule of thumb.

i'm telling yall - dbx and noise is no longer an issue. it blew my mind how well it worked.

tapedeck, did you buy a 688 ?

This one was recorded to a fostex portastudio all in one cassette machine.. it sounds pretty grimey that machine... O.o