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I had an idea that come half from Boards Of Canada and half from William Basinski (see: The Disintegration Loops ) with a little bit of the recent mp3 thread thrown in. I was thinking of investing in a new cassette deck to implament in my production. I have a really low end deck I use to rip my cassette for archival purposes. The deck is a shocking 10 to 15 year old Goodmans effort that I fear will shred my cassette but I digress. The idea came to me when I was listening to Basinski's Disintegration Loops.

I was thinking of upgrading to a new deck, possibly a Nakamichi RX-505E, and using that to resample essentially. I would come up with a synth patch and button out sections of a song. I would take the sections (maybe 4 bars to begin with for test purposes) and when I'm happy, bounce to .wav. From there I would tape that to cassette. Here is the interesting part. I would go through a process of taking that tape recording (and I may need two decks for this) and rerecord the sampled part, tape to tape, for a number of times. Say 10 or 20 times for test purposes.

My aim is to see if this would provide that same warm, glowing almost "analogue transcoding" sound that I could use in songs. You know, that kind of not fuzzed out but hazy effect you hear in BoC tracks and on the Disintegration Loop series.

It also got me thinking of using this process on sampled vocals and various other elements of a track I could be working on. It is an interesting thought anyway.

Has anyone ever tried this? I've seen something similar done by a film student I knew in passing with a short film he made and VHS.




NB there are several variables to consider. I think the frequency range for cassette is about 25Hz to 19,000Hz. I realise a lot of that high range will be lost in the process. The deck I mentioned is has a 20–20,000 Hz range, but is high quality and won't degrade the tapes as quickly as a terrible deck that would essentially damage the cassette beyond use, so would this hinder the process?

Similar to engineers rerecording tape to tape, toggling noise reduction on and off. Can't remember the exact process but I remember hearing about it being used to brighten drum tracks I think? Although that sounds kinda dodgy come to thing about it. It might have been warmth... someone help out if they know what I'm talking about
Can't speak for sound degradation but I'm sure with enough playing around you'd be able to get some warm saturation out of it. I might use it parallel to a dry bus but it's an artistic thing, so the quality reduction might be to be desired in this case.
Only one thing to do, try that shit out and report back

Funny I just borowed a double tapedeck from a friend yesterday. I was planing to do the same thing. I didnt read about it anywhere, It just came to my mind after seeing the tapedeck in his home. I will give this a try... edit: Just listening to old tapes on my studio monitors shows how much warmer it sounds." I like it!

I do this sometimes with a 1/4" reel-to-reel, but a lot less now that I'm making more dubstep and less old school house and techno. You'd be surprised how quickly the signal degrades, and of course the noise floor rises with every pass. Cassette tape is a pretty terrible format for fidelity; it's cool for individual channels as an effect but you'll probably wanna tidy it up by sequencing clean sounds (eg the cymbals) separately. There's a big distinction between sounding warm and analog and just sounding like you've recorded everything onto cassette tape a few times

But yes, definitely do the experimentation yourself. Playing with tape is a lot of fun and the permanence of it (inability to click "undo") forces you to make decisions and get on with it.

I can't remember if I posted it already, but I also figured out a way to make real tape echo using only a DAW and tape or cassette player with a "monitor tape signal" record function, no physical tape loop required. You can put anything you want in the feedback path and do some really crazy shit that you couldn't do with an old school tape delay. Let me know if you can't find the post and I'll write up a tutorial.

tomm wrote:NB there are several variables to consider. I think the frequency range for cassette is about 25Hz to 19,000Hz. I realise a lot of that high range will be lost in the process. The deck I mentioned is has a 20–20,000 Hz range, but is high quality and won't degrade the tapes as quickly as a terrible deck that would essentially damage the cassette beyond use, so would this hinder the process?

I think 20-20k would be very optimistic, for a start. Specs are often misleading and with cassette the weak point will be the resolution of the tape medium, not the deck, since it only moves at a couple of inches per second. Also, remember that "frequency range" usually just refers to the -3dB points anway, so the response starts rolling off before it reaches the upper cutoff -- and if you keep bouncing stuff again and again the overall -3dB point on the original signal will fall with every pass, the highs being replaced by noise.

BTW, tapes do degrade but again I think this will be less of the concern here than the medium itself; the audio degrades from the process of being written to tape at a much higher rate than the physical plastic degrades from being played.

static_cast wrote:BTW, tapes do degrade but again I think this will be less of the concern here than the medium itself; the audio degrades from the process of being written to tape at a much higher rate than the physical plastic degrades from being played.

Ah, yeah. This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for.

See, I'll be using this for ambiences (think Pangaea-esque flowing, ebbing atmospheres like that in "Memories") and pad sounds more than an overall collection of tracks. I might apply the process to more than just ambient sounds as I see fit while I work on making it sound useful.

And cheers for the heads up my man! I'll have a look for your previous thread/post when I get home.

Go for it-- degradation is one of those things we have visceral responses to. Look at anything where there's proper-quality film interspersed with super-8, etc-- the brain almost processes it as a memory. Very powerful tool.

i think in reality, cassettes topped out at like 10khz?

Totally doable, and worth doing IMO - only as an effect for one or two channels though, as stated. The noise builds up fast.

Use high grade chrome tape - ferric just isn't good enough, and metal has too hard a knee in terms of its compression characteristics. Good chrome tapes are dirt cheap, buy a pack of 5 and you're done.

Get the best tape deck you can, lose the Goodmans. The most important thing is to make sure it has adjustable bias. Spend some time setting the bias so that it comes back off tape with the same amount of high end, lots of ABing and little nudges of the knob until you're sure it is coming back 'flat'. In reality you can get a decent response from, mmmmm, 40Hz to 16kHz - but again, you need to set the bias just right or it will just roll off the highs.

Also be aware that the tape will mess with the timing, so for timing-critical elements, process to tape before you chop up and sequence. No point making the perfect drum track and then pushing it to cassette, you will have to rechop the entire thing to make it tight again. Of course if you have a monitor head this doesn't apply, you just move the whole thing forward a bit to put it back in time, but I don't know of any cassette machines that have a monitor head. Might be some though...

Rolling off the lows on a drum break, absolutely battering the thing to tape at +6, putting it back in the box and putting the lows back... no plugin sounds like that!

Sharmaji wrote: i think in reality, cassettes topped out at like 10khz?

You can get up to 16k reliably (tape dependent), but the lack of adjustable bias means they naturally roll off without compensation. So the general impression is of lacking highs. Magnetic tape as a medium in general has a very wide bandwidth, as I imagine you know... so I'll shut up

I would like to clarify that I won't be using this technique for any of the rhythm section (bass, perc etc) initially. It's for ambiences. I make a lot more noise, ambient and guitar drones than I do electronic dance music but I'd like to apply those basic Satie concepts to my beat driven tracks. If I'm using it on perc I might try and use it on individual sampled hits if that is a possibility or at least 10 or so seconds of the same hit looped so I can pick the best of the bunch, you know?

Aye, the Nakamichi RX-505E is the best I can afford at my budget (second hand of course). I would go for the Dragon if I had more expendable money sources. It has adjustable Bias and I've looked about and it seems to be the best in my price range. I'll be using the deck primarily for cassette playback. I'm a bit of a sap when it comes to those little guys. I buy an armful a month, ha.

Thread is shaping up nicely. Thanks for the info and interest lads.

yeah the issue isn't magnetic tape, it's the transport medium

TBH i wonder if you wouldn't be happier with a salvation army-level tape deck, one that induces huge amounts of artifacts. There's been plenty of times i've bounced things to 1/4", 15ips tape and thought, wow... that machine sounds really clean. If what you want is a drastic alteration in sound, quite often the professional solutions are a bit too... professional.

also don't rule out playing something back and capturing it thru a microphone, even (especially) a cheap, on-board mic, and using that recording.

Sharmaji wrote:yeah the issue isn't magnetic tape, it's the transport medium

I was just making the point that cassette isn't (quite) as bad as people make out, if done right

TBH i wonder if you wouldn't be happier with a salvation army-level tape deck, one that induces huge amounts of artifacts. There's been plenty of times i've bounced things to 1/4", 15ips tape and thought, wow... that machine sounds really clean. If what you want is a drastic alteration in sound, quite often the professional solutions are a bit too... professional.

Aye - cassette is the perfect solution in that way, IMO.

The Nakamichi hould be perfect by the way, heard good things about them. Went for a decent Denon myself

Piano to tape as well = sexytime.

When you say tape deck, are you meaning the reel-to-reel ones or the ones I used to tape the Essential Mix off when I was back in college?




(And if it's the latter, what's a good make to get?)

I dont have much too add to this whole thing cause macc n sharma made me feel all stupid not knowing fuck shit about how tape works.

But!

I just wanna say, that basses, coming out of my pc through my mixer cranked ito the red and then into a VCR... sounds fucking awesome.

On a note though, so does cranking the mixer level to red and recording back into my PCmic... so I feel its the too-hot signal onto vcr thats giving the effect, not the vcr itself...

I guess what Im getting at is to tell you it sounds sweet if you do it reallyreally fuckin loud.

tomm, you told me you were into the experimental underground tape shit right? Pretty sure that's what a lot of these dudes do to create that aged far away sound a la skaters/ferarro. 10th gen tapes give it that warm old sound like the shit has been sitting in a basement since 1981. Lo-fi and delicious, hazy bidnizz.

edit: btw, read that Ferarro uses a cheap ass karaoke machine for most of their recordings, but you know the kind of analog shit-fi sound I am talking about I'm sure

btw, love these old Nakamichi decks, got an old RX-202, shit is just ridiculous.

^^ having individual adjustable input/output level is a godsend btw, makes this tape shit that much less frustrating

Sharmaji wrote:Go for it-- degradation is one of those things we have visceral responses to. Look at anything where there's proper-quality film interspersed with super-8, etc-- the brain almost processes it as a memory. Very powerful tool.

Nicely put, and true

Sharmaji wrote:also don't rule out playing something back and capturing it thru a microphone, even (especially) a cheap, on-board mic, and using that recording.

and again

macc wrote: Went for a decent Denon myself

What Denon do you have? I just got bought a Denon DRW-580 on eBay tonight... will be picking it up next week.

Tomm, you have probably the best taste in music on the forum. Looking forward to hearing what you come out with.