I was not into recording with tape. I did have a Teac 4 track reel to reel and a Porta-One back in the day, and I did a few demo's in tape based studios before DAW's. I still have the 1/2" maters around here somewhere.... 

All my experience with tape is very limited but I do remember how much of a pain it was working with it. Trying to get punches in the right place. And splicing tape..... what a PITA. 

I love digital...and the features and the ease with which we can do things now that just a few years back were the domain of the engineers in the "big studios" exclusively. 

I recall a review of a CD release in Guitar Player Magazine. The CD was the TRIO. Linda Ronstadt, Emmy Lou Harris, and Dolly Parton along with the best acoustic pickers from Nashville. The review simply stated, said that "this project was the reason they invented the medium of the CD and digital recording"  the nuances and quality of the vocals and the instruments were simply amazing. 

had a mix.....

spent weeks tracking it, multiple sessions, multiple players....


fostex 16 track reel to reel....

sounded good....


someone backed into the tape machine while it was running during final mix, made the tape eat itself.

crinkled the tape, made an obvious 'divot' in the playback...


i hate tape.

always have.

Thanks Danny. Yeah I have grown up with tape and although it is possible to get the tape machines very flat they still exhibited some sonic changes. Like the bass end often adding to the deeper notes and the transient response not being perfect either.

I think a lot of it comes from playing drums and recording engineering. I would go out and do gigs hearing my Sonor kit which out of interest has a high transient attack to the sound anyway, above normal for drums. Then after recording them I would be not completely happy with the snap on the drum sound. That was all around the late 70's and 80's for me. 

I do agree about guitars too. A fair while ago I had a mastering job that had some very jangly guitars in the mix and I found the only way was to transfer it to tape and back to digital. I found the tape soothed the guitar sound nicely. (and add a bit of bottom end weight too which suited this mix perfectly, it needed it) But the tape plugs can do the same thing now without all the fuss of tape machines etc..I have got a mastering job on right now where the client wants a Led Zeppelin final mix type sound. He has mentioned tape sims so I might be using those in this one.  

And on the subject of console emulation at the TAFE we have an SSL AWS 948 mixing console (hey its only $99,999 now at Sweetwater!) and that is a fine representation of a very high end analog console. When you compare monitoring direct out of the HD interfaces compared to the same tracks going through the SSL channel strips there is no magic sauce there. Even with all the EQ's and stuff switched in what you hear is a very close representation of the sound coming straight out of Pro Tools. The Mic Pres are sweet though and make all our mics sound much better!

And batsbrew I feel for you! I think the worse thing is you have worked with a multitrack for days and during a high (and I mean fast people!) speed spooling operation something very bad goes wrong and you just see this mess turning very pear shaped and tape just flying up everywhere being ripped to shreds and people ducking while tape reels fly around the room because someone did not lock a reel down properly. 

But hey you know you can erase everything you have done in the digital world in a microsecond and even without anything obvious that something terrible has just happened. Isn't that a lovely feeling. But the tape going across the room is pretty awful too. Tape has got its issues too. Hiss being one of them and spending lots of time with Mr Dolby's stuff, crosstalk. Great, you can't record next to that track! Cutting tape, I do love that too.

But you know I am reading the book 'Lennon' by Tim Riley (and loving it too, I highly recommend this book) I am amazed at the stuff George Martin was doing with tape even before the Beatles with radio plays and comedy stuff and all. Very creative. Analog mixers and tape machines also created the template for the wonderful technology we have today. 

And herb I have still got my 1/2 " machine and would  be happy to transfer the tapes for you. I have even built the special oven for doing the baking if it needs it. I have got DBX and Dolby C noise reduction systems for that machine too. It is a beautiful Tascam 58 with a nice gentle pro transport. (I promise to keep your beloved masters in one piece!)

I basically have come to take the position that Jack White does, that it's NOT SUPPOSED to be easy. It shouldn't be easy to do punch ins. It shouldn't be easy to tune and comp and time and quantize and sample replace. It's only because digital allows those things easily that they have become more important than actual skill these days for most people. The more primitive tools of the past forced people to generally consider actually becoming good players and actually playing it right as the first line of attack, whereas these days I wonder if it's even above third on the list.

I think that the limitations of reproduction of analog gear is a good thing really. It's like film vs. video. Video looks vastly more realistic, but who wants to go to the movies and see that? People have spent lots of bucks creating digital cameras which don't look like video, because there's no romance in video. The same issues apply in music. There's just not as much romance in digital, so people jump through hoops to try to get some back in.

Not that I think that tape is coming back by any means. It's clearly an economic impossibility at that point. But it seems like half the effort of developers in the plugin world is to hide the lack of romance in digital. Now if they could just put as much effort into making the tools extremely hard to use for tuning, timing, comping, quantizing, and replacing, we might see a resurgance of respect for actual musical skill.

A return to live performance as a requirement for being (or trying to become) a professional musician would help in that respect as well, since 90% of the apparently perfect music out there would get their makers laughed off the stage if they had to actually perform it probably. That would provide a strong filtering mechanism, which the music world needs desparately these days.

That is a good point Dean and I agree with it in many ways. I have not been talking about the music or performance so much as the medium itself. 

But there is no reason why you cannot use the same mentality with a great sounding digital system. Just record tracks, leave out the click, don't edit, don't use many plugins at all and restrict how many tracks you actually work with. It is as easy as that. But of course that is hard too. Why have so many tools and techniques available to you but restrict yourself in terms of how you use them. You don't have to work in analog though to be like this, you can do it in digital. Work in digital, change your approach. 

There is a good argument for it in that it forces you to bring out the best with what you are working with at the time. But you don't have to go too far the other way either. There is a balance in between. People like Danny Danzi are using modern recording technologies but still getting great performances, great sounds leaving the amps etc and things before even getting to the DAW. But then going a little further inside the technology making the music more interesting and exciting and I try to work that way too. A great band playing a great tune or arrangement is a delightful thing for sure. 

Synthesisers (and sounds) are something you can have too many of for sure and many people around here have far too many and are still buying more. I had very limited synth resources when I first started out. (3 things, one drum machine, one monophonic instrument (Korg modular though!) and one Oberheim polyphonic beast. I craved to have a room full of instruments like the famous synth composers. I did not but learned how to make the ones I had do everything and more that is for sure. And also combined with a handful of effects like spring reverbs, flangers and phasers, Leslie speakers, Space Echo to be able to disguise the sounds of those synths even further and make them sound like I had many more. And of course tons of multi tracking and bouncing to get a simple monophonic instrument to end up creating a dense complex texture.

Those were the days! But even with synths we have got modern VST's now that are just out of this world and can do stuff the old analog beasts could not even contemplate.

Too funny, I am reading the same book Jeff.  Interesting discussion going on here.

i use the digital medium (sonar) just like i did the tape machine.

i don't edit stuff, i just hit record, get a capture, if it passes muster, i move on, and if it sucks (more times than not) i punch in a new pass, and never ever keep the old stuff.

LOL


but, the way you use the media aside, i find the digital media much more powerful in every respect, and much easier to manipulate the SOUND, so if i want something deadly precise i can get it, and if i want something to sound vintagey, i can get that TOO

There is no denying from the samples the differences in warmth and clarity between the two. What a person prefers is really irrelevant today as we have the option of both. A good engineer should not be concerned about analogue or digital, but about good sound however it is achieved.

I'd love to know what Zappa would have done with a modern DAW. That man was a genius when it came to splicing tape. The thing about Zappa was, it wasn't just that he was a great composer, but he was also a great "organizer." He said so in his book, "Just give me some stuff, and I'll organize it for you." I think in that respect, he would have loved a program like Sonar. 

Zappa was always an innovator and lived at the cutting edge of technology throughout his illustrious career.

The way he embraced Synclavier technology is surely as good a pointer as any that he would have also embraced a modern DAW.

He would have loved it