Analog Mastering #03 | Tape Machine Alignment 

Coming soon!

Glad you liked it!

Thank you for watching!

Can you please clarify your question? We are thinking of doing a video of shaping sounds with a tape machine and different tape machine heads.

Lot of bands record analog. And many studios in LA have tape machines. In 2022

That's wrong !!!

TBH, I think they're gonna understand better than the past generations with all these videos! But I'm just a tourist so maybe that is a dumb statement?

I still use analog. Started with cassettes, and I just got a Sony TC 252. I’ve recording all my bass parts through it, and there’s so much more headroom when recorded to garage band.

Who’s fault is that?

Our analog console already gives that warmth to digital mixes and we don't run the digital mixes through the tape machine for the sake of adding color and warmth. But doing this in the mixing stage on individual elements of the mix can be a cool way to get sounds.

:)

Aside from the pleasing sonic characteristics of hitting tape, there are many things to consider. Whenever you do anything to anything, there is loss. If you transfer to and from tape, there is a degree of loss under the best of circumstances. So, like anything else, one must understand what they are trying to achieve. Again, outside of the sound characteristics, the benefit of analog tape is maintaining the analog integrity of the sound without introducing a digital converter. Analog tape can maintain the integrity of the frequency spectrum that cannot be achieved with digital, even when introducing high sample rates such as 192k. In digital, there is still a cut off point, with analog, there is no cut off point. Now, these opinions can be argued on their merritt because what digital does bring is so integral to how records are made today. All in all, you have to understand that going to and from tape requires a digital to analog converter, a good maintained tape machine, good quality tape (hard to find these days), and then an analog to digital converter. You also need to understand gain structure through all of this, which is an art in and of itself. That is a lot of processing! So, unless you’re looking for the sound characteristics of tape, it’s really not advantageous because the tape becomes a storage medium for the digital file at that point. Aside from the sound, the real benefit to going to tape is if you were recording direct without any digital processing at all.

@@reubencohen6476 Thank you so much!!