analog tape

Sunday Synth Jam: This video captures the Open Reel Ensemble, a group that does DJ-style performance mixing, performing live. Read more…

This video demos the Tapehead Inspector – a sort of tangible sampler. 

Here’s the background on it, via Roy Mohan Shearer:

Inspired by the reversal of the name of a musical trio that I play in with Chris Croasdale and Mr. Jonnie Common. We’re really into tapes, and as Chris’ birthday was coming up Jonnie and I decided to make him a wee instrument: A manual tape player, ie. one in which the player can directly control the movement of the tapehead against the audio tape.

Simply a hack of the increasingly hard-to-source cassette walkman, I took out all the mechanics, hard-wired the tape circuit to ‘on’, lengthened the cable to the tapehead and housed the whole thing in a videotape casing. Jonnie built the instrument case/playing surface and then we made up a few audio tape ’slides’ by recording some of Jonnie’s choice vinyl to tape and getting crafty with scissors and sticky tape! I am abridging greatly for brevity here – I maimed one walkman making the whole thing work and the overall instrument design was chewed over a few times over cups of tea at Jonnie’s house. We’re pretty pleased with the results and hope Chris enjoys inspecting his tapes!

Looks like this would be fairly easy to recreate – and an interesting, tactile way to manipulate sound. 

The Bob Moog Foundation has been awarded an “Archiving and Preservation Planning Grant” from the GRAMMY Foundation to assess the preservation needs of the over 300 reel-to-reel tapes in Bob’s archives.

These tapes include seminal works in synthesis from the mid-60s to the late 70s, such as works from Herb Deutsch, Wendy Carlos, Larry Fast, Isao Tomita, Keith Emerson, Roger Powell, Chris Swansen, John Weiss, David Borden, Joel Chadabe, John Eaton and many, many more.

The $8,000.00 grant provides for the assessment of the tape’s condition by a team of experts including an archivist, a preservationist (responsible for digital transfer), a historian and a copyright expert. The assessment team includes archivist Steve Weiss, Sound and Image Librarian for UNC-CH, preservationist Seva David Ball, recording engineer/mastering engineer, Soundcurrent Mastering, historian Douglas Babb, Curator for the Bob Moog Foundation, and intellectual property attorney Steven Schnedler. Michelle Moog-Koussa will be coordinating the project.

Once the assessment is completed, the foundation will have the opportunity to apply for a $20,000-$40,000 preservation grant to set about preserving the tapes in a digital format, so that they can be shared through the Foundation website, traveling exhibits and eventual Bob Moog Museum.

Image: Bob Moog’s analog tape machine

Matador records filmed a set of short documentaries on the all-analog mastering process by which Mission of Burma’s landmark recordings from the early 1980’s were re-mastered.

The process documented is vintage, old-school tape process. The gear is original. The vinyl is live cut.

It’s an interesting and timely set of videos:

Mission of Burma- Burma Reissue Mastering Sessions Part 1

Read more…

DUY has announced that DaD Tape is now available as an RTAS, Audio Units, VST and MAS plug-in.

DUY DaD Tape was originally developed for TDM in the mid-90s to satisfy the needs of digital recording technology, and escape the “cold digital recording media”. To achieve the desired results, four of the most representative tape machines in the market were physically modelled.

DUY also simulated three of the most common noise reduction systems, and even added a proprietary noiseless-tape mode. All these features are integrated into DUY DaD Tape, along with a switch that allows to switch between tape speeds. The plug-in has become a standard when it gets to delivering an analog tape character to a final mix or a section. Read more…