General tape / cassette talk here.

Moderators: lazyben, static14, texasvinyl

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By maxlevel
#114316
Edit 2- correct link now

Edit: so here it is, a tape made from records and tapes. For those interested, it was mixed on a porta 5 but recorded to my Sony WMD6C on RTM Fox C60 type 1. The digital is .wav 48k/24bit so you can hear my turntable motor grinding. The entire digitised version and tracklist are included in the google folder below. If anyone actually wants a physical copy I’d be happy to send a copy if you chip in a few £ for postage. I’m making a few copies for mates anyway.

There’s definately a few ropey moments and at least 1 phone message as I used a Bandcamp track off my phone but I actually worked up a sweat on side A. It’s a bit wild, I love it. You just don’t get that making playlists on iTunes.

Soundcloud link: https://m.soundcloud.com/user353993872

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... aG7j6eWB6I

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So it’s time for round 2. At the moment due to a massive oversight @scojo now has the only copy of vol.1.

But! Now that I have spent considerable amounts of time picking up some knowledge I can now properly offer anyone who wants a copy, on a decent-ish tape using a decent-ish process. I can’t afford a fader because I am forbidden spending any money until I get a decent project which dosnt pay slave wages. on listening today, my turntable is definately a few sandwiches short of a picnic. And to top it off, my amp started emitting smoke during NOTL yesterday.

I like and own all sorts of filmy stuff. It’ll be 60 mins. If anyone wants a tape, they can swap me one (still waiting for @scojo’s tape) or I can send one for a few £. Or something. I’ll most likely be using the new Fox c-60 but may resort to TDK D.

Bit of fun
Last edited by maxlevel on Tue Feb 12, 2019 11:44 am, edited 4 times in total.
User avatar
By inksb
#114319
I'm interested but since I live across the pond how do you feel about sending the digital copy so I can dub my own tape and save us the $$$?
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By maxlevel
#114320
It’s all sourced from vinyl and tapes, and maybe a track from iTunes but there isn’t actually a digital copy of the whole lot. I could send the tracklist I guess but half the fun is no tracklist, so il have to figure out how to make a digital copy. I’m sure I use to have a DAC

Edit - I can do it through a spare fr2LE. Not used that in a few years!
User avatar
By inksb
#114321
Don't worry about it then. I assumed you were transferring tracks to a computer from turntable, mixing then sending back to a tape deck. I would still like to see the track list when done :)
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By maxlevel
#114472
Ok so I’ve thought a bit on how to improve the tape. 1) I’m going to get hold of a small 4 track mixer and make a proper tape mix. I have alot of mics and recording equipment for work but it’s not for music mixing. 2) I’m going to use my spare/redundant work kit to create a lossless/wav copy of the two sides, and host it somewhere so people can listen if they like.

I have no idea how to make J card inlays. If anyone has any ideas...
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By inksb
#114475
For j-cards I use the template on duplication.ca in photoshop, if you don't have photoshop you can use GIMP which is the open source version. It's a pain to adapt to from PS but it works and gets the job done. I then print on heavy card stock. If you are not comfortable doing that work, I can give you a hand making a printable pdf if you want to send the artwork over.
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By maxlevel
#114503
I’m currently leaning towards a white label from a label printer. Design follows function. Ultimately I want to make a tape worth listening to over and over, but not so broad that it ends up being Jaws and Debussy for side A.

But also! Good news. I bought a Tascam porta studio last night for pennies on eBay. It’ll arrive tomorrow, I’ll have to fix it but making real progress now. The tracklist is almost there. I just hope the pots don’t scratch
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By ScoJo
#114504
maxlevel wrote:I’m currently leaning towards a white label from a label printer. Design follows function. Ultimately I want to make a tape worth listening to over and over, but not so broad that it ends up being Jaws and Debussy for side A.

But also! Good news. I bought a Tascam porta studio last night for pennies on eBay. It’ll arrive tomorrow, I’ll have to fix it but making real progress now. The tracklist is almost there. I just hope the pots don’t scratch
Sounds great @max! I'll give your previous mix a spin today, to celebrate the arrival of the Tascam and New Frontiers in Mixology :)
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By maxlevel
#114510
Hey the porta has a loop function. Wait until I start remixing/bastardising all you hold dear like a drunk who’s lost a bet
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By maxlevel
#114551
So this arrived this morning. It was broken, but I spent about ten minutes on it, totally fine. I’m one cable short and should be able to crack on. My only slight issue is this unit doesn’t allow you to split input signals so will need more cables for a stereo track; it’s designed for 4 single inputs to be panned to create the image, as opposed to receiving a stereo signal and outputting to another source in LR. But I guess that will come in future, just a matter of thinking caps.

One odd function which makes sense for the 80s, it plays back both sides of a tape because it’s a 4 track recorder. So, my tape with deadly avenger was playing back side a and b, but because B has some speaking tracks it was playing deadly avenger with backward vocals all over it. It was a trippy moment. Modern playback would never have such a quirk.

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User avatar
By ScoJo
#114556
maxlevel wrote:So this arrived this morning. It was broken, but I spent about ten minutes on it, totally fine. I’m one cable short and should be able to crack on. My only slight issue is this unit doesn’t allow you to split input signals so will need more cables for a stereo track; it’s designed for 4 single inputs to be panned to create the image, as opposed to receiving a stereo signal and outputting to another source in LR. But I guess that will come in future, just a matter of thinking caps.

One odd function which makes sense for the 80s, it plays back both sides of a tape because it’s a 4 track recorder. So, my tape with deadly avenger was playing back side a and b, but because B has some speaking tracks it was playing deadly avenger with backward vocals all over it. It was a trippy moment. Modern playback would never have such a quirk.

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Hey bud - sorry if this is patronising/pointing out the obvious (I'm just not sure from your comments whether you understand it's function or not) but 4-track tape recorders were specifically designed for home recording, multi-tracking: it uses the whole of the tape width for each 4-tracks of recording, therefore if you put a pre-recorded tape in you get both sides playing simultaneously.
Traditionally, there was great fun to be had deliberately recording in such a way that you could add backwards guitars etc... and with 'bouncing' down, you could do rudimentary recording of more tracks. Somewhere I have some of my original tracks from the 90s recorded with a later Tascam Portastudio, I should try and find them.

Again - apologies for any TapeSplainig here, I just can't tell from your phrasing whether you fully 'get' the beast's function ;) Nothing to do with conflict between 80s or 'modern playback' specifically, although obviously this type of home studio is from that era!
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By maxlevel
#114558
Hey, yeah I understand it but I wasn’t expecting the speed of it. Basically I got a ‘HS’ model, high speed, without knowing what that entailed. So I got high speed reversed speech, which caught me off guard. I would assume today that you could select tape speed and later Tascams offered this.

By ‘modern’ I mean multi tracking is done now in entirely separate ISO, and can be independently routed anywhere to as many outs as you like. My work machine has unlimited routing; this unit has 1 LR output and the bus allows 4 (or as many bounces) with some basic pans. When I started in the 00s we were at the end of DAT tape going into Flash and we were trained to use resources much more carefully, whereas companies like sound devices have started actually removing tracks from portable units as the machines got too heavy.

This unit is fine, it’s just got weird functions. Instead of individual EQ, it’s got ‘high’ and ‘low’ on the output bus. This has zero purpose. And while it does have individual tape effects for each track, that’s almost beyond this portable units portable nature. You’d need so many cables, and have these all over the workspace that you may as well just make the whole thing much bigger and add more useful knobs. So it kind of sits between two houses!
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By ScoJo
#114560
maxlevel wrote:Hey, yeah I understand it but I wasn’t expecting the speed of it. Basically I got a ‘HS’ model, high speed, without knowing what that entailed. So I got high speed reversed speech, which caught me off guard. I would assume today that you could select tape speed and later Tascams offered this.

By ‘modern’ I mean multi tracking is done now in entirely separate ISO, and can be independently routed anywhere to as many outs as you like. My work machine has unlimited routing; this unit has 1 LR output and the bus allows 4 (or as many bounces) with some basic pans. When I started in the 00s we were at the end of DAT tape going into Flash and we were trained to use resources much more carefully, whereas companies like sound devices have started actually removing tracks from portable units as the machines got too heavy.

This unit is fine, it’s just got weird functions. Instead of individual EQ, it’s got ‘high’ and ‘low’ on the output bus. This has zero purpose. And while it does have individual tape effects for each track, that’s almost beyond this portable units portable nature. You’d need so many cables, and have these all over the workspace that you may as well just make the whole thing much bigger and add more useful knobs. So it kind of sits between two houses!
Ahh, roger that.

All this talk of picking this up for buttons has me hankering to go a-searching.... eek!
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By maxlevel
#114569
I saw a porta 07 on eBay this week, I reckon I should have held my powder a bit. My brother uses a berhinger euro rack 4 track mixer for his nob twiddling, but has now realised he would like some faders for actual mixes. You can do the same with a potentiometer but it’s just not as precise