Splicing Tape Loops 

Former-engineer-me cringes... Use a splicing block, especially for taping the bits together. Splice to leads so you can spool all tape onto an 'ashtray' rather than letting it run wherever. Never (ever) move the pancake without a reel underneath. But the most important of all... Always remember to degauss the tripod and the mic stand. ;-)

"Stops the machines" Should be a merch T-shirt for sure :D Great Video.

Next time you get mad at your DAW, folks... watch and re-watch this ;)

11:06 First time i see Hainbach expressing real human emotions Amazing video as always

"Let's do the right thing and play it back at half speed!" :D Priceless Could be written on a t-shirt. I know it's three years later now but I still must try this 🤩

Thank you for not editing out the goofs. It’s hard to learn without mistakes and seeing someone else make them helps others avoid.

14:00 - "Honour thy error as a hidden intention" (Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt - Oblique Strategies)

14:10 that sincere laugh made me so happy and started my day on the right foot :)

Your pleasant surprise when you find out the cymbal is backwards is great. Thank you for sharing this without over-editing - so much more authentic

STAHP ZE MASCHINES!

another inspiring video. Most of us would have gone mad when the machine pulled in the tape. But the serenity with which you react is also reflected in your music. thanks for the creative impulses

Reminds me of my youth. You can also have it pull from the center of the spool if you want. So fun

Hainbach is the master of ambient drones. This is really cool, but I fear if I bring home a giant tape machine home my girlfriend will kill me. Thank you for showing your mistakes and the process that you went through. Nobody is perfect and especially not these trolls in the comment section.

The merch plug, the technical problems, the end result, what a ride that was, lol

RU-vid is such a beautiful thing.

An analog man in a digital world and it's amazing! Nice video, keep it like this.

My heart leapt to my throat as I watched you scramble to turn off the machine. I'm glad it didn't do any real damage. The music is sweet as usual. The backwards cymbal is thrilling.

Nice, Mr. H. Like you, I have some high-end tape machines and limited experience getting deep with them, like this. Best experiment was probably getting an old Telefunken answering machine loop to convert into a useful tape-echo reel without much mess (it was short). I have so much respect for the masters of this craft, Delia and all those who never received the recognition they deserved. Perhaps we can try to use one channel with a pulse recorded simultaneously (listening to it also in headphones), to sync a modular to the tape loop and hopefully make finding exact cut points easier. In a way, what they did back then with measuring tape and multiple pieces of the same note is easier...but there's nothing particularly easy about any of it. A real nail biter of an episode. Excellent work, and brave of you to share the journey with all of us.

So cool vid. I love that you chose to leave your mistake in the video.

I'm sorry to say, but the more you struggled, the more I enjoyed the video :) It hit close to home, and made me feel better about the growing pains of creating something. Can't wait for the next one!

My god! This is absolutely insane & incredibly difficult! Watching this, I was reminded of Perrey and Kingsley (among others with infinite patience and diligence from the period) and how they created practically all their music in the 60s and 70s this way - the only form of sampling. Amazing to watch this and think about how "electronic" musicians struggled before the advent of the digital age.

really funny in a subtle way. a fascinating machine from the past. the sounds finally cuddling the soul as always. thank you hainbach !!!

Terry Riley had his loops go out of the window in his yard spinning around bottles. The amount of patience a person has to have to create an album this way is dedication! Love to see you enjoyed this experiment very much. Tape splicers make it a tad easier, but yes mistakes will happen: )

I love the sounds made by the play head being in operation while you're pulling the tape around.

"I hadn't intended that, but it's lovely". I love how the backwards cymbal draws you in and very suddenly releases you.

Wow I haven't done that since college back in the early 80s. One of my first loop pieces was made from a recording of me playing my flute in a stairwell. It took me about a month to create. I still love the piece. You can get a splicing block for taping the pieces together. It makes it a lot easier

That reversed cymbal at half speed sounds incredible

The way how your reel to reel fast forwards sounds oddly futuristic. Almost like star trek. Great videos dude and keep on the tape recording

videos such as these reinforce what makes you a pleasure to watch! you are quite willing to show your mistakes and still make some beautiful textures in doing so

"doing stuff like this on cassette, making your own loops pffff, I find that to be rather difficult..." YUP! haha, but might have to do a video like this using cassettes...

The reversed cymbal is a happy accident. Love it.

As far as advice for you, try recording at double speed then when you play it back at normal speed you will hear the difference. I think it gives it a little bit more character. Plus u save tape

This has been amazing and takes care of some G.A.S. that I had 15 minutes ago. Now I am going to hug my Morphagene, my Phonogene, and my El Capistan, and my Volante.

The physical aspect of tape- you running it around your door handle, draping it over the mic stand- is what makes it seem magic to me. It's something real, and can be manipulated in physical ways, interact with the world. You don't get much of that in a DAW, and it feels inspiring, somehow, to be reminded that music is still more than data

That was so awesome! Great sound and experimentation.

"Now let's do the right thing and play it back at half speed" love it!

Wonderful! Fascinating, informative and (very) entertaining at the same time. The result? Pure magic! Thank you.

Very cool...such fun! Makes me want to edit some tape. Thanks for the inspiration.

„oh, merch!“😆 nice advertising technique!

i think you blew my mind with this. i previously thought tape was a waste of time but damn. the reversed cymbal is a thing of beauty, especially at half speed

Great work. I spent years editing 2” tape for clients and don’t miss it. Editing 1/4” tape for myself, however, is a lot of fun

Lovely sounds, and the smoothest merch plug I've ever seen! :-P

Such patience you have.

the cutting block on the bottom right of the machine has a channel in it for splicing the tape together

Am I the only person who would happily buy a Hainbach “stop stop stop the machines !!!” t-shirt ?

I used to love my Revox B77 with optical sensor. When locating edit points i could manually shuttle the reels back and forth with my hands a bit like a dj with a record, making sure i kept tension between both reels. Im not sure you can do that for yours because these reel to reel decks often employ quite strong clutches or brakes. Love this though and very entertaining ‘STOP THE MACHINES!!’ 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I shot a documentary recently at the rest of WDR STudio für elektronische Musik, with Volker Müller the sound engeneer, that worked there since 1972. And he used the old 50s/60s setup with three M15s for this. Pretty impressing, I got to jam on them during the breaks. He showed some pretty nice techniques. Can let you know when its finished!

Ha! That merch plug was great. Simple and to the point.

a bit of advice for the initiated - store your loops tails out on small 5cm bobbins (small reels) for posterity and LABEL them with the date - you will be GLAD you did !!! i have several hundred of these from the 1980s

that pure joy at 14:11, I felt that :)

And just like that, Hainbach gets fired on his very first day at the Radiophonic Workshop.

i just love this guy, he inspires my videos for sure. can't wait to see more HAINBACH!

I haven't edited tape since I was in college in the 1980's, but I think you could be making it harder than it has to be. Normally, you would rock the reels back and forth manually as you dialed in an edit point. then you would mark it with a grease pencil so you know where you're going to make a cut. You would do that for both the beginning and ending of your edit segment before making any actual cuts. As others have mentioned, you would also want to lay the pieces of tape together in a splicing block while you tape them together. You could do your cutting there as well with a razor blade, although your built in cutting mechanism might be better.

Well done Hainbach..very mellow loop. The reverse cymbal was a happy accident.

Great video! So unique, I love the warmth it has. Now I want to try splicing!

Man you are superb!... though... 11:58 LOL. Great stuff...

Just happened to pick up an old tape machine yesterday, then I come here to find this. Serendipity!

Great video, I'm glad that the loop turned out so well.

Bro, you made me lmfao! I just got a tape machine and this is going to be me soon. 😂

your videos always have a relaxing aura I think! I would love to have so much analog equipment, it sounds so fun. vst will never do that (luckily?)

Rewatching some old videos. And now I get an urge to cut up a recording into tiny spaghetti. Scramble it around and blindly splice the random pieces together. Probably do it into two separate loops so I mix them together on a third final stereo track and hard pan them to get the full width. Having one loop slightly shorter to have things go in and out of phase. Though, I have no tape gear ready... I guess something similar can be achieved in digital if I follow the same methods andturn off waveforms to keep the workflow blind. Hmmm. Darn it. Now I've gone and bevome inspired. Darn ye to heck.

So cool to try the old way! Wish I can do that ones, but man, what a work!

This is my expensive splicing tape. I now going to place it next to the rolling capstan. Let's see what happens 😂 I have experienced that the capstan can grab my fingers during cleaning; now I only work on the tape recorder when it is off!

Thank you for sharing this wonderful technique 🙂 Dont have that fancy gear but gonna try it with a regular tape cassette and see how it will sound 💁‍♂️

Awesome video! I don’t know if this was mentioned elsewhere, but when I was doing theatre sound with tape machines back in the 80s, I’d use a white grease pencil to mark edit points so I wouldn’t have to guess. Love your vids!

Incredible as always. Looking forward to more in the future!

So I look and learn what I can do with my old taperecorders, tapemachines and the tapeecho.

Watching this makes me think my Octotrack purchase a while back was a wise one

And this is a perfect example why digital was invented.

that was great Hainbach, a lot of work but a great result, something tells me this took quite a while :-)

very funny in some moments (for me, I don't think it was for you). Good sense of humor, man!

Fantastic. Sounded very Ambient 1 which is no bad thing!

Great video and great resultant tape loop!

Not sure if this is noted, and it's really not a big deal: when you're cleaning tape heads/mechanics with IPA, clean in a wiping in one direction fashion (left to right). You will risk scratching, and deforming your heads if you rub on your heads with a dirty/fluxy q-tip. It's not a big deal, but if you're using tape machines almost DAILY, you're going to wear those heads eventually.

This was incredibly inspiring, great work!

Results were good.

rarely do i hear the term "apothecary." super cool!

Really good!

6:33 = Best rewind sound ever

Aahaha, 11:05 "Staph ze maschines" had me laughing 😂👍 Great and enjoyable video.

Man i felt that blue tape but worth it, that's a great loop you ended up with

That was fantastic to watch

wonderful.

Sounds really nice!!

You could also make use of a yellow chinagraph (= wax) pencil to mark your edit points and number each piece of tape. Deffo recommend a splicing block to make sure the two ends of the tape butt up against each other. No overlaps, and no gaps otherwise tape adhesive will get on your heads and capstan. Use spools not pancakes, and rock both of them back and forth to get your exact edit point.

Thanks for showing your fails :)

you should record and chop up the sound of that deck in rewind. Killer video here, as always

Thank you immense interesting! I like the meta soundtrack with all the machine sound .... tape between fingers and so on

Can you please do a video on doing backwards effects on a reel? THanks

I am so happy to have found your channel. Your style of video making is so captivating and inviting. Thank you so much for sharing your creativity!

Stop! Stop! Stop the machines! Ah yes, the beauty of tape machines.

Невероятно, вы удивляете каждый раз. Браво!

i love this. are cassettes the correct gateway drug into tape loops?

Amazing!😍😍😍

You ought to get a tape splicing block/guide. Surprised that tape machine didn't have one attached. 😊

"My expensive tape.." 2 seconds after.. woups

Morphagene IRL! Love this video, fascinating stuff as always

Dude I used to spend weeks doing this making rap beats. It would piss me off when nobody gave 2 shits about the difference of sound or the time it took everyone would just say " I think your mpc is messed up" !!! Haha regardless its awesome that you are messing around with tape it really does sound better than just using samplers to loop or even worse my ultimate hatred, fruity loops!!

Immer wieder eine Freude :D

Wonderful. Similar to working on the OP-1, so frustrating sometimes but also unique and rewarding. If only OP-1 offered some of the tape character as an effect to suit how it otherwise emulates tape!