I know this isn't what alot of peoples intentions are but it works, it is fun, and it gives you another avenue to manipulate your sounds. It allows me to make composed joints that have not only the sounds i like, the way i like, and does this without the sort of "sterile" sound you get from most purely digital sounds. I record back in, chop it up like a record sample, and with drums on top and a clean bassline, i find this works really well. All this puts it to the quality of a record that had a medicure pressing. I use tape just to lo-fi it up, take of some of the "digital", as well as get some artifacts from a well used tape. I often will compose something in Reason, purely to put to tape. But from alot of the things you mention as bad, i think can be good. this will be particularly interesting if you're a jazz or noise musician. you've just created some random music that will never end until you hit the stop button. just have fun and see what comes out from your improvised jamming. you can record layer after layer on the fly and it will just keep repeating itself. pop this into your multi-tracker, hit record and start going off. once your modified cassette is ready, you should have a tape that plays over & over non-stop for about 1 minute. if you really want the full effect, open up the cassette and remove the few seconds of tape that you can not record on and put it back together with a small slice of scotch tape. these are usually under a minute long and loop infinitely rather than ending & needing to be flipped. Go to your local radio shack and see if they have any cassette tapes for answering machines. If you end up getting a multi-track cassette recorder. I would just check to see if the heads inside are oxidized or very dirty, but since most tape decks are closed because of the tape, you should be OK. I have a Technics tape deck and also a tape deck in an old JVC mini component system which I used to record back in the late 90's. I found some good tracks that I had forgotten about because the archive files, gear, etc., are missing and all I have are the tapes and minidisc. Yeah, the bass/lower frequencies benefited the most, but the mids and highs were working out very nicely too. I did the same thing & put them into the Mac. I then found some old cassette tapes from 98. I can process them to enhance, but initially, I was underwhelmed. The results are OK, but I wasn't overwhelmed. I've been going through old minidisc of improvising I did back in 01-03 and was a bit disappointed in the quality, overall. I think tape saturation is highly overlooked. It was one of the most unreliable and volatile formats out there. Waste of money in my opinion, but if you really want to go this route there's decent tape decks showing up on Craigslist every day where I'm at, even some Nakamichi decks for under $100! Your only other option is to resample the drums from tape, but then you're throwing it all through an A/D again and it's just a mess. Unless you have an expensive deck with MIDI sync, forget it. Some good EQing and compression techniques will get you much farther.Īnd as it is, drums are the only things that really benefit from a little analog love. The tape benefits are so marginal that it's a waste of time, especially when you deal with tape head wear, replacing belts, calibration, finding good tape that's not 20 years old. A 1/2 track TEAC and a 1/4 Pioneer (the RT-707, which is sort of like the 1200 of reel to reels). I was big on playing around with reel to reels and own two that are now in storage. I don't do anything with it but listen to old tapes when I come across them though, or some real quick off the cuff recording where I'm too lazy/uninterested to load any software. I copped a Denon single well deck off of Craigslist from the early 90s that is mint for probably $30 all said and done (bought an old Gemini turntable with it for ripping alone, that was later traded for vinyl). I think Tascam still makes them brand new probably not a bad investment if you're into this sort of thing.
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