God do I hate tape.
I am so happy not to have to deal with it anymore. I’m a spoiled brat when it comes to recording. My experience with analog was from age 15-18 with my Tascam 464 portastudio 4 track.
I quickly moved to digital hard disk based recording at that point with a very short stint using 2 inch tape at ‘the big studio’
Why do I hate tape? Because of time. You can’t move from one spot in time to another spot in time very easily with tape. Everything is linear- one straight line from beginning to end.
Clearly for many very successful people and for those who charted the way for multitrack recording, tape was king. Thank you Les Paul and George Martin for showing us what could be done!
Tape is great if you think in separate long strips from beginning to end about your music. I don’t think that way at all. I think in terms of parts and sections. Maybe things repeat, maybe they don’t. Maybe they come back to this section, maybe the whole thing gets faster here.
The point is, when I start laying my ideas into the physical universe I like clay. I like being able to mold and reshape after I can see little bits of what I’ve created begin to take form.
The beauty of working with a hard disk vs. working with tape is that hard disks let you mold and reshape as you go. With tape it’s one long stream of consciousness. Of course you can punch-in etc. with tape too, but once you’ve tried it with a hard disk, there is no comparison to the struggle these things take with tape!
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The NLE aspect is ALL I like about digital recording.
Analog-plug in a mic, turn on the recorder, hit record.
Digital-plug a mic into an interface that plugs into a computer that runs a program LIKE a tape recorder. Make sure your interface is recognized by the computer,make sure you select this interface in the recording software, and that you select the correct output, so you can hear what you record. You also have the computer’s operating system’s audio mixer set, as well as the sound card’s mixer set correctly. If you’re lucky, you still remember what you intended to record after jumping through all these hoops, and are still inspired enough to do so.
As someone who works at a “big” studio where we sometimes record to 2″ analog 24-track, we always ALWAYS roll the tape into Pro Tools once we’ve got some good performances on tape, to start tweaking the performance.
There are plenty of hoops to jump through with tape too. We have to calibrate the machine, clean the heads, etc. But it does sound cool. It has its own magic. I like being able to hold a heavy reel in my hands and know that this machine, which is older than I am, will never give me a buffer underrun error.
I will say, if you’re going to hit tape, your performance had better be pretty tight to begin with, because tape is expensive.