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Ever used REAL tape saturation?


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IE, not as a VST effect, but literally recording your mix onto tape, then immediately recording the result back into your DAW?

A producer friend of mine mentioned he swears by that technique. I'd imagine you'd need to make sure you're going in digitally (RCA?) to a fairly high-end machine, use the best quality cassettes you can find (what would that be?), and hopefully record it back in digitally.

Anyone tried it? Might be worth a shot for warmifying acoustic tracks.

(Or perhaps a complete waste of time, but it's fun to try new things ;-))

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Recording something onto tape elicits two things:

1) Soft Compression

The oxide layer on tape is organic, it doesn't response to dynamic changes quite like digital. You end up with what is roughly a 1.5:1 compression on the recorded material. This is the "saturation"

2) Bass emphasis

When the heads on the tape machine aren't perfectly aligned (they often aren't) you get an emphasis in the lower frequencies, a boost around 200hz IIRC. This is the "warmth"

Tape has other idiosyncrasies but they are not desirable, e.g. bleed-through. So I'd say the 2 things I mentioned are what your producer friend is swearing by, whether he realizes it or not.

And if you're talking about using tape for recording, you're talking about a reel-to-reel tape machine, not something that uses cassettes -- thus making the barrier to entry for this sort of experimentation prohibitively expensive.

Well, a cheap Tascam 8-track or similar ilk could work, it just won't yield very good results for a full mix. Running selective tracks thru inexpensive tape would be fun to try, though.

cheers.

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Speaking of this, I may have the opportunity to pick up an old school reel to reel tape machine for free from a relative's old home studio (he's since gone digital - actually designed and built digital multi-track recorders). I'm trying to decide if it's worth it, though, based on the possible musical applications.

Thing is, there is some work invovled in upkeep. Namely "baking" the tapes in a special type of oven a couple times a year or so to keep them in working order.

I've heard great things about tape saturation, but I guess I'm trying to figure out if it's worth the trouble to achieve the effect.

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I thought baking (apart from the initial production of the tape) was only used really as a temporary fix for binder degradation so that you can recover data? I don't think that its a necessary storage requirement. And whatever effects you get from it probably isn't worth it unless we're talking master tracks of commercial releases.

(Not 100% sure if I've remembered this correctly, hopefully analoq can back me up on that)

But to answer your question, if its free, go for it. Tape is getting pretty expensive. A top end 30 minute 24-track reel can be upwards of £300.

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Yeah, I know some artists who also swear by that technique of recording to tape and then back to Pro Tools (or whatever.)

Interestingly, when I tried recording some drum sounds to tape - specifically, kick drum - it sounds like the bass actually got kinda weaker instead of more powerful. The exact OPPOSITE effect I wanted, not to mention more noise. This might have been a bias issue though.

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This makes me recall the analog/digital debate, and the last time I participated in that I was several years younger and knew far far less than I do now.

At first I thought the argument was purely scientific: You get a continuous signal, no breakup. But, of course, the bit resolution is set high enough that our ears will never know the difference.

Then it was a "sound coloring" issue. Analog had a "warmer" feel. Having never grown up on analog I really can't comment, but I wish I knew what the hell they actually meant by that.

Then someone stepped in and said that digital was most likely to get you the sound as it sounded. Given that, I knew the debate was over right then, because now you're free to color it however you like. Which is why I can't imagine tape would be worth all this. Just use one of many plugins to emulate the analog, if you so choose. At least, that's how I understand it.

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Well yknow what this all makes me wonder though: Why can't we have a device that does this for real, but as a simple digital interface?

Basically I'm thinking of a USB device that sends an audio file digitally to the device, it has some kind of an audio interface inside that it uses to play and record to tape, then with some latency (physical space between heads) play and record BACK to digital audio.

There's a website http://tank-fx.com/ that actually does a very similar thing, but with reverb.

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a tape - what a great format - a medium that degrades everytime you play it - but analog surely has a sound and feeling all of it's own

tape is expensive but you don't need a 24track reel for a master :P

honestly, i wouldn't mind doing it all for anything that is not heavily electronic - it's coming back in a big way - but i would want to do some reading before i jumped into it

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Man, this thread brings back memories when I took electronic music in college. The final project was a composition that MUST use the reel-to-reel tape machine, which I think was a 4-track recorder. I also had to use the mini-Moog that the school owned, which was an absolute blast to use, and I learned a lot at how sounds were created. Ah, patch cables....good times.

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back in high school an eccentric musician friend of mine layered songs together using 6 or 7 of these old hunks of crap:

Tandy_Model1_TapeRecorder_s2.jpg

...not that the songs were any good or even listenable mind you, but those junky old tape recorders can probably be bought for a dime a dozen.

yes i realize you're all talking about reel to reel, but i thought i'd offer a more cost effective and potentially hilariously embarrassing solution.

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