So I Bought An Old Tape Deck And I'm Going To Run My Stuff Through It

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TheGodOfRainbows
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Joined: 31 Mar 2015

13 Aug 2018

Fascinating. Omg now I want to buy a tape deck. What hurricane said about the transients and how harsh things sound when not recorded to tape really got my attention. I been frustrated lately with my music having too much bite or ear stabbyness (I made that word just now), and no matter how I eq or compress, or adjust the ADSR, etc, I can't get things to sounds thick and full, without then making it too dull.

How does tape deal with low and muddy range frequencies? Does it hurt or help with muddiness in the mix in general?

Perhaps tape is the missing link? Would it be fair to say it's more difficult in some ways to mix these days simply because of how unforgivingly pure and 'harsh' digital is versus analog tape, since there is no natural compression or transient softening or saturation or anything happening?

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aeox
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Joined: 23 Feb 2017
Location: Oregon

13 Aug 2018

motuscott wrote:
12 Aug 2018
The more you know,

the more you don't know
If anything is true, it's this!

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Marco Raaphorst
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Location: The Hague, The Netherlands
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13 Aug 2018

MarkTarlton wrote:
11 Aug 2018
if you can find a 3 head tape deck you can have even more fun :)
yeah that's cool!

I have an old CassetteDeck 2 by Nakamichi, not lofi, but retro hifi :D

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MarkTarlton
Posts: 795
Joined: 15 Jan 2015
Location: Santa Rosa, CA

13 Aug 2018

Marco Raaphorst wrote:
13 Aug 2018
MarkTarlton wrote:
11 Aug 2018
if you can find a 3 head tape deck you can have even more fun :)
yeah that's cool!

I have an old CassetteDeck 2 by Nakamichi, not lofi, but retro hifi :D
I have a nakamichi mr1...3 heads...it's an excellent slap back :)

also a wonderful predelay before my furman rv1 spring reverb.

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hurricane
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14 Aug 2018

I put up some examples of my tape experiments on a new SC page which I hastily created because I didn't want to post them on my main music page.

You can find them here: https://soundcloud.com/hurricaneaudiolab

This is nothing mind-blowing - it's just some stuff I ran through the tape deck. I'm not even sure if it's going to be that obvious on Soundcloud. I left the hiss in, but if were going to track through the tape deck I think I would definitely use some noise reduction.Some of the examples are pretty obvious. Others, like the pianos, you'll have to pay attention cuz there's some cool wobble in there. You can really hear the tape on the drums. I tried to put a supersaw in there just out of curiosity and I don't think I can tell the difference on that one. I also played a part of my song "Overdrive" on the piano and ran that through tape. I also ran my track "Dance" through the tape deck. Comparing it to the version I posted on my main SC page is horrifying. I slammed that thing to death. So embarrassing. The tape version is way better, IMO. Anyway, I'm just getting started with this whole tape thing. One thing I still have to do is run all the parts in my next track through the cassette deck. That should be pretty interesting I think.

Now that I have this page up I'm going to do more tests and demos like the ones I did a while ago for Arturia's filters (which you can also find on my page).

That's it.
Soundcloud | Youtube
Logic Pro | Bitwig

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