Using tape as an effect

[staticcast]

That said, I hardly use mine anymore ever since I made a VST that does the same thing...

EDIT: these corn smilies are fucking great

[nowaysj]

personal or professional? on the market?

[staticcast]

Professional side-project - not yet sure what will become of it. I haven't quite got the imperfections nailed but the frequency response, saturation and noise are pretty convincing. The main advantage is that there's no latency so you can use it as an insert, whereas you get the head delay (~1-2 seconds) when bouncing to tape so it's always offline (and destructive).

[nowaysj]

Dood, keep us updated on that one, sounds very interesting!

===

By the way, when did ferox stop being a freebee? That sucks.

[phrex]

very very interesting read!!

[staticcast]

Dood, keep us updated on that one, sounds very interesting!

===

By the way, when did ferox stop being a freebee? That sucks.

Will do. Is Ferox not free anymore? Hmmm. I wasn't too impressed with it as a tape simulation to be honest, but I never made any music with it so maybe it was useful as a generic "warmer".

BTW, out of the tape sims that I've heard, the UAD Studer emulation blows the rest out of the water....

[EDN]

Does anyone know if it is possible to use video tape and a VCR for a similar effect?
I would assume that you could but I don't know how it would sound... any thoughts?

[insine]

Does anyone know if it is possible to use video tape and a VCR for a similar effect?
I would assume that you could but I don't know how it would sound... any thoughts?

Absolutely! Anything is possible, it all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

I believe the audio track on a standard vhs is smaller than cassette tape, so less range. Hi-Fi vhs has a lot better range(use the high speed setting, slower speeds will sound compressed). The problem with most vcr recorders is that you have to have a video signal present while recording audio. Without the video signal you could get dropouts and odd pulsing audio. Look for one that has a switch to turn off the video input. Experiment with both and see what you like better. Always use shorter length tapes.

I recently mod'ed a cassette player for a friend who uses them a lot in his production. I'll see if I can get a sample of his work and post it up here, very interesting effects come out of that walkman.

[alphacat]

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.

...

While I totally concur that reel-to-reels are sexy as fook - and also a desirable thing to have in one's studio arsenal - if you're buying one for the sole purpose of just making it another effect, then unless you're doing serious proper oldskool Dub then I'm not sure that the expense and effort justify it. You're dead on about taming/rounding off harsh transients; however, there are other analog signal routing techniques one can employ to do the same thing, although it's probably not going to glue the submix together the same way tape does. Another approach that I've read about is running the bass and drum submixes together (at the same time) through the same stereo compressor to tighten 'em up. Beatles and others used to do this.

And with cassette yeah, the SNR is obviously a lot dirtier than 1/2" (or bigger) tape: but - I wouldn't recommend just using a shit boombox either. If you have a multitrack tape recorder then you'd probably wanna run it at the highest IPS rate available, and using brand new high quality tape with relatively short reel times (30 min and not the 90 min tapes; the longer they are, the more they stretch.) But even with cassettes, the noise floor's pretty easy to identify for cleaning up later.

Does anyone know if it is possible to use video tape and a VCR for a similar effect?
I would assume that you could but I don't know how it would sound... any thoughts?

No, because VCR tape is digital (even if it's magnetically recorded.) The old Betamax machines used pretty much the exact same tape as DAT machines did. You can use VCRs to bounce down tracks, but that's an old tape recording trick when you're running out of tracks that you're not likely to encounter today in DAW-land.

[staticcast]

And with cassette yeah, the SNR is obviously a lot dirtier than 1/2" (or bigger) tape: but - I wouldn't recommend just using a shit boombox either. If you have a multitrack tape recorder then you'd probably wanna run it at the highest IPS rate available, and using brand new high quality tape with relatively short reel times (30 min and not the 90 min tapes; the longer they are, the more they stretch.) But even with cassettes, the noise floor's pretty easy to identify for cleaning up later.

Fair enough - I don't really like using noise reduction. Defeats the point IMO. Noise is great.

Does anyone know if it is possible to use video tape and a VCR for a similar effect?
I would assume that you could but I don't know how it would sound... any thoughts?

No, because VCR tape is digital (even if it's magnetically recorded.) The old Betamax machines used pretty much the exact same tape as DAT machines did. You can use VCRs to bounce down tracks, but that's an old tape recording trick when you're running out of tracks that you're not likely to encounter today in DAW-land.

VCR tape isn't digital. The original VCR standard is analog, baseband-recorded, bandlimited to 10kHz, so in theory you could saturate (but again, whether a consumer-grade video recorder has a powerful enough record head to saturate a VHS tape, I don't know). However, with the subsequent "Hi-Fi audio" revision is they started modulating the audio (FM I think) to push it into a different frequency band, so you can't do any meaningful processing on it. My best guess would be that you'd clip the input amplifier, the clipped signal would be modulated onto the carrier, and you'd get the clipped signal back again on output (so again, you're effectively at the mercy of the input electronics).

[alphacat]

Sheeeit... I was wrong about VCRs being digital. You're right. They're not. I had it mixed up because DATs used the same tape but digital encoding. Doh!

And yeah, most consumer grade VCRs not only had weak recording heads, but all sorts of other shit that would interfere with using it for recording purposes like really hot compression (sometimes as high as 16:1) built right in to the audio circuitry, no bypass.

Anyway-

Along the same lines as the OP topic, you can rip the amp circuits out of old tube-based radios and use them as a send; they color & warm up audio nicely a lot of the time, and you can find these radios cheap in thrift shops from time to time.

[benjam]

This thread inspired me I went out and found an old kenwood deck today. Gonna have a mess around this weekend

[wub]

This thread inspired me I went out and found an old kenwood deck today. Gonna have a mess around this weekend

where'd you get it from? All the ones I've seen on eBay seem to go for stupid money.

[benjam]

This thread inspired me I went out and found an old kenwood deck today. Gonna have a mess around this weekend

where'd you get it from? All the ones I've seen on eBay seem to go for stupid money.

It wasnt too bad but im currently a rich ass student until I grow the balls to check my balance haha

[levitate]

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.

i was looking into this quite heavily a couple of months back, definitely going to get on it when i have my house sorted.

although 2 head cassette decks make up 90%+ of cassette decks there are still loads of 3 heads to be found, for reasonably cheap. search '3 head cassette' on ebay and you'll see. i think i'm going to get one this week and do some budget dub delay engineering. did you ever post the tute of how you set up that DAW/tape echo thing tj? would be very interested to learn...

[nowaysj]

BTW, out of the tape sims that I've heard, the UAD Studer emulation blows the rest out of the water....

I heard this too when it released, not in real life, but web demo, and it gave me the largest uad pangs I've ever felt. It does sound just amazing.

[staticcast]

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.

i was looking into this quite heavily a couple of months back, definitely going to get on it when i have my house sorted.

although 2 head cassette decks make up 90%+ of cassette decks there are still loads of 3 heads to be found, for reasonably cheap. search '3 head cassette' on ebay and you'll see. i think i'm going to get one this week and do some budget dub delay engineering. did you ever post the tute of how you set up that DAW/tape echo thing tj? would be very interested to learn...

No, but it's fairly simple...

1) Make a return track and route it out to your secondary outputs (eg 3/4) where the tape machine is connected
2) Make an audio track, set monitoring to IN, set inputs to the inputs your tape machine is connected to. This, paradoxically, is the "return"
3) Start the tape rolling and make sure the monitoring on the tape deck is coming from the heads, not the tape input

To add feedback you just turn up the relevant send level on the audio track so that it feeds the tape signal back into the delay line. The delay time is adjustable by putting a 100% wet simple delay (with no feedback) on the return track, and if you want to filter the feedback loop you can just stick an EQ on the return track as well.

Dry/wet level is a little more complicated. What I do is make a second audio track, route the output of the first audio track to this one, and set the output routing on the first audio track to "sends only". Then the wet signal comes through the second audio track and you can turn down the volume here without affecting the feedback.

[staticcast]

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.

i was looking into this quite heavily a couple of months back, definitely going to get on it when i have my house sorted.

although 2 head cassette decks make up 90%+ of cassette decks there are still loads of 3 heads to be found, for reasonably cheap. search '3 head cassette' on ebay and you'll see. i think i'm going to get one this week and do some budget dub delay engineering. did you ever post the tute of how you set up that DAW/tape echo thing tj? would be very interested to learn...

No, but it's fairly simple...

1) Make a return track and route it out to your secondary outputs (eg 3/4) where the tape machine is connected
2) Make an audio track, set monitoring to IN, set inputs to the inputs your tape machine is connected to. This, paradoxically, is the "return"
3) Start the tape rolling and make sure the monitoring on the tape deck is coming from the heads, not the tape input

To add feedback you just turn up the relevant send level on the audio track so that it feeds the tape signal back into the delay line. The delay time is adjustable by putting a 100% wet simple delay (with no feedback) on the return track, and if you want to filter the feedback loop you can just stick an EQ on the return track as well.

Dry/wet level is a little more complicated. What I do is make a second audio track, route the output of the first audio track to this one, and set the output routing on the first audio track to "sends only". Then the wet signal comes through the second audio track and you can turn down the volume here without affecting the feedback.

[insine]

I recently mod'ed a cassette player for a friend who uses them a lot in his production. I'll see if I can get a sample of his work and post it up here, very interesting effects come out of that walkman.

Ok, here is the track. It's by a producer named Citymouth from Portland. This track is from a forthcoming cassette release called astrocentric due out later this year. If you like what you hear follow him on Soundcloud.

all organic sounds were recorded in Portland and sent through the circuit bent walkman cept one clean field recording and some ocean sounds I sampled off the Pill Wonder record.

Soundcloud

[alphacat]

That's actually a pretty cool tune - took a little bit to fully engage me but once it did it had my attention.

It occurs to me that maybe a lot of the static/hiss samples folks like James Blake use are probably derived from tape recordings too, now that I listen to this...