Editing and clean up on analog tape

[Justin Foley]

If your machine does not have spot erase (manually moving the reels in edit mode with record engaged), I recommend physically noting the sections you want to erase with a grease pencil, start and finish. Punch in and out (knowing how much extra time after the punch out you need), make sure you're measuring from the Record head (as mentioned above) and have the playback/punch speed at the absolute lowest speed your machine can go. Assuming that the machine can't also play/record backwards, you can flip the tape over to do erase count ins.

Man, I wish my machine had spot erase. Spot erase is cool.

= Justin

[Matt C.]

yeah i don't think my machine lets me engage record in edit mode for spot erasing. that would make things a lot more simple.

[drumsound]

yeah i don't think my machine lets me engage record in edit mode for spot erasing. that would make things a lot more simple.

I've never even tried that. I'll punch something if it's really bad.

I don't believe in stripping the tom tracks.

[cgarges]

I don't believe in stripping the tom tracks.

Can you imagine how lame "Killer Queen" would sound if those tom tracks had been stripped? Bye bye bass drum sound...

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[drumsound]

I don't believe in stripping the tom tracks.

Can you imagine how lame "Killer Queen" would sound if those tom tracks had been stripped? Bye bye bass drum sound...

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

That is SO true.

So often, as I'm building a mix I think the drums sound thin or weak and then i push up the tom mics and there it is.

[joel hamilton]

a hole punch can help out for a really tight mouth noise... find it in edit mode, then punch a hole right at the spot, at the track where the vocal is at. Like a really bad lip smack that happens in a quick little gap.... but that you cant get on with automation too well...
I only did that a few times, but i did it.

[nick_a]

holy crap, joel. i think i read a while ago about about what visconti used to do, especially when comping vocals or whatever, what other dudes are mentioning, which is essentially recording silence over the gaps in playing on a track, i.e., going down the list of overdubs and one by one inserting silence in between tuneage. crazy. clearly doable. and then you can actually use the reel again in the future.

[drumsound]

a hole punch can help out for a really tight mouth noise... find it in edit mode, then punch a hole right at the spot, at the track where the vocal is at. Like a really bad lip smack that happens in a quick little gap.... but that you cant get on with automation too well...
I only did that a few times, but i did it.

Window edit with a hole punch. Awesome!

[psinglet]

Will a MS 16 still run with the tape pulled from between the capstan and pinch roller? I used to spot ersae all the time with an 85-16B. Mark the in and out positions with a grease pencil making sure to use the playback head as reference. Pull the tape from between the capstan and pinch roller. Make sure you are in between the marks on the erase head. Engage track making sure nothing is feeding it. Press record/play. Manually move to the beginning and end points using erase head as reference. Move to a point in the middle of the marks. Press stop. Done

[kevin206]

So much good info here! I'm ready to set up the old 16track and start practicing edits. I was always so afraid that I would erase something critical. I tried to punch-in my overdubs to minimize noises that I may have to deal with later. Then i bought a noisy peavey 5 channel noise gate. It sounded worse than the noise that I was trying to gate! It did work for live stuff though.

[joel hamilton]

Double post. i suck at the internet.

[joel hamilton]

When I would be mixing, I would wind up with a 2 track (either 1/4 or 1/2) reel with the mixes on it, and the mixes woul be flagged and named by writing on the leader what mix it is. the leader would either be paper or regular old polyester (or whatever) leader tape. I would cut the leader right up to the downbeat of the song so there was no crap out in front unless we decided to leave the clicks and stuff. I even had some 1/2" leader that had increments marked on it for seconds... at 15 and 30ips. It was for assembling the whole record on your production reels. Like cutting in a 2 second gap between songs, or whatever length you wanted. More like 4 seconds, usually at that point. The vinyl gap, not the CD gap.
It sounds all fun and quaint now, but that was the only technology I owned for making records even as recently as 1997. After that, stuff like DAT and sound designer started to be what the mix was printed to... along with the 1/2" machine.