whats 'smpte'?

can soemone help me, and tell me what the smpte jacks are for? im new at all this

It stands for The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, The SMPTE Time Code signal is the motion picture industry standard method utilized for synchronization of audio and visual elements.

So you can sync your MP up to different Gear i.e. Analog Tape machine, another MP, etc..

hope that helped

man, i feel like such a moron, thanks again enotide. does anyone actually use these?

one-up wrote:man, i feel like such a moron, thanks again enotide. does anyone actually use these?

no

well maybe, but if your makin a hiphop beat, i doubt you would, im not sure of other pieces that have smpte that i would use mine with.

Well, The SP 1200 heads use this in studios. Apparently the SP1200's tempo fluctuates a lot when clocked from midi, and from what I hear, isn't too solid playing from it's internal clock. Not that it matters that much, the TR 808 will do this, about +/- 1 bpm. So to record many use the SMPTE because it locks the SP tighter.

When I get my reel to reel I will experiment with it some and see what's up with it.

so in theory, you could synch up a beat from your mpc, with like, a music video?

yup.

elmacaco wrote:When I get my reel to reel I will experiment with it some and see what's up with it.

Yeah the reel to reel has to have multi tracks, not just stereo.
Because you need a dedicated track to stripe SMPTE TC to, usually the last track i.e. (tr8,tr16,or tr24 depending on how many tracks you have).

And to because of Bleed through with Analog tape you need a Buffer track(Blank track) as well i.e. (tr7,tr15,or tr23).

YUP, I am aware of this, but thanks.

elmacaco wrote:Well, The SP 1200 heads use this in studios. Apparently the SP1200's tempo fluctuates a lot when clocked from midi, and from what I hear, isn't too solid playing from it's internal clock. Not that it matters that much, the TR 808 will do this, about +/- 1 bpm. So to record many use the SMPTE because it locks the SP tighter.

i'm just learning, but is smpte a lot tighter than midi, so it would be good to use if your syncing your mpc with a DAW, like Sonar, Cubase, etc.

with an sp. yes, mpc, no.

A bit techie but if you're interested

http://www.philrees.co.uk/articles/timecode.htm