Tape "Sampling"

[ithoughticouldrelate]

So just curious if any of you have / would ever make use of this sort of thing. I realize you'd have to be kind of masochistic. But, have you ever chopped up say some acoustic drum kit recordings and re-ordered / re-timed them manually by tape?

I'm imagining the drummer playing individual sounds (so like bass drum for 4 bars, snare hits for 4 bars, a few fills in time, etc). to a click (or close enough anyway) and then having a tape splicing sort of jig that you mark 16 bars (distance proportional to your BPMs). For 120bpm at 15ips you'd have almost a metre long strip of tape to work with...much wider than say a TR-808. You could even cut out snare sounds, trim them nicely, snip them in half, and then combine two different hits. Or a snare/bass combination, snare/cymbals, etc. I'd imagine a lot of bouncing would be required though to really build up a beat.

Supposedly something like this was done on Airbag (from an interview I've read a while back with Nigel Godrich) but I don't know how extensive the chopping up actually was.

Sort of like a poor-man's all-analogue Redrum. Worth it? I have no idea! Sound unique? I'm sure...question is whether it's a "good" sort of unique.

So has anyone done this / something similar? Just how many times can you chop up tape in a 1 metre section before it refuses to playback anymore?

And related: is it possible to "butt-join" two bits of tape together, or do you always have to do the 45 degree cut I typically see? I'm guessing that this is to "crossfade" the edit?

Worst case scenario is you use up maybe 20 metres of tape, and one way or another you'll be far more adept at doing "repairs" than ever before.

[Nick Sevilla]

Never.

But, I remember reading on this type of stuff being done before ProTools existed.

By maniacal beings sent from hell.

Cheers
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The Song. Nothing else really matters.

[kslight]

I think you'd have to be totally out of your mind to make this into an "all analog Redrum." I guess its possible, but I think it'd be...challenging and tedious to keep everything in anything resembling accurate timing. I mean at that point, if you are that crazy, why not have the drummer play one drum at a time across the whole song, and create beats like that? Just sayin...

I do know that with some producers flying in certain drum fills/patterns would not have been unheard of (Ross Robinson I know did this), in a similar fashion that you might "comp" a part...but not at a hit by hit level...

This is probably why samplers were invented... And indeed that'd be substantially more practical, and some samplers though digital certainly have a sound of their own...I use a 12 bit sampler for signal processing sometimes.

[Dakota]

See:

The Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows" - drums are a tape loop, ala sampling - many other layers in that song are tape loops and chopped tape...

The Beatles "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" - tons of the spooky break sounds are small chopped and spliced tape chunks re-assembled in loops and strips

"Tape sampling" is all over the Beatles' stuff - they got the idea from George Martin, who got it from being up on the Musique Concrète movement.

The Bee Gees "Stayin' Alive" is a tape drum loop.

I've done this plenty, and still do on occasion. It's way more effort than doing something similar with a digital sampler or in a computer, but there is a sound and feel to it that digital methods just can't get. Tape is wilder and more melty and organic and compelling.

I also modded a Space Echo to do 12 to 32 second looping, and put in a switch to defeat the erase head, so it can do looping layers and chunks in a very melted tape-sounding way... it gets that feel faster than doing hand splicing.

[Dan Phelps]

The closest I've come is to take some drumming recorded to 2" and cut it up semi randomly (the cuts were on drum transients, but not systematic) and essentially mix them up in a hat and splice them back together randomly to make a multi track tape loop. It turned out pretty cool and became the basis for a song.
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[Gregg Juke]

Related random things like the concept mentioned, but not exactly it, that I have done or seen people do, to wit:

* Serious mind-numbing editing (like removing all of the "ahhs," "umms," and other verbal pauses in long interview segments)

* Tape Loops-- Used to make them all the time, and also used varying tape speeds (1 & 7/8, 3 & 3/4, 7 & 1/2, and 15 ips) to half-time or double-speed a particular rhythm part against another (if you're going to play with real [reel!] loops, you'll need at least a few tape machines and a bunch of mike stands for loop-extension)

* Rhythmic vocal edits and experiments with "backwards masking" type effects

* Cart Machines-- The old cart units used to have a "remove cue tone" button, so that you could in effect make an everlasting loop

* Drum editing-- I've seen a particular engineer whom I've mentioned before, mark amazing drum edits with a _rolling_ tape at high speed (15 or more ips; no "scrubbing"), who could make awesome edits just with grease pencil and one cut-- no "oops" and no fixes...

What the OP is talking about is definitely possible. It just depends on how much you value creativity/"uniqueness" over sanity and simple workflow.

Also, from my experienced, you always want to go with the angled cut (it just works better). And have a _sharp_ razor blade, or you will destroy your master or spend hour after nerve-wracking hour trying to fix your edits.

GJ

[drumsound]

[drumsound]

[Gregg Juke]

But Tony, you've got to admit that the only real diffences are quantitative, not qualitative; as in, amount of razor blades and editing tape used, number of tiny pieces of recording tape lost, and number of cut finger-tips from exhaustion.

GJ

[will]

More like this, then?

http://youtu.be/rXEBDCX_O6M

[Gregg Juke]

Yeah, pretty much like that!

GJ

[Theo_Karon]

YES!!! this is totally time consuming and absurd but the results can sound really awesome. Also think about pitched sounds... I like to get samples of instruments doing sustained pitches within the range of the varispeed on an 8 track (about a minor third apart usually) and then "play" those pitches onto another multitrack note by note... so damn time consuming, but it sounds like nothing else.

I did a tape loop a while ago based on a drum machine pattern that a glitchy 606 kicked out, charted out which hits happened together, recorded them together and measured the tape to get the timing right... somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 edits on the loop, if I recall correctly. This is sort of the epitome of analog means informed by digital methods... you get the strange and gridded perfection, but also the completely irreproduceable and unpredictable nature of magnetic tape sliding past a head.

Multitrack tape loops are a great tool for this as well... you can edit together a beat that uses a few tracks on the loop and then overdub onto the remaining tracks while listening to the loop. Randomly punching in and out on those tracks can yield very interesting results.

Many of the sounds on the first two tracks ("Shine Whole" and "Madchen") here were made this way: http://soundcloud.com/thisiscinema

Also, when you really get into the zone with this stuff it doesn't take as long as you might think it would... once I'm warmed up I'm usually able to do about 30 seconds per edit, which is a lot of concentration but really not all that much time... haven't you ever spent several hours hacking out a part before? This is really not much different.
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[Theo_Karon]

Also: I got really excited when I read your post and decided to reply before reading the whole thing, because I thought I was the only idiot foolhardy and bullheaded enough to actually see such a clearly wrongheaded practice through... but to address another question you asked: it won't harm your machine in any way to do straight-up perpendicular edits; it can sound pretty cool, and is actually essential to preserving the transient if you're editing right at a drum hit with silence preceding it on the previous strip of tape. I sometimes do really sloppy edits deliberately, as the pop made by a bad edit passing over the head can sound pretty cool in the right context. You can actually get a pretty wide range of sounds just by magnetizing the tape irregularly with a toy magnet and then cutting and/or folding the loop to create irregularities... you can also get a perpendicular edit to sound quite smooth if you are careful about it and do it correctly.

OH and make sure to label your tape strips and direction... a grease pencil is an absolute must. Things will get overwhelming and confusing very fast otherwise, especially if you sneeze...
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[fossiltooth]

What the OP is describing sounds a lot like a Mellotron, with a few variations. If you wanted to be really cool, you could make a vinyl version too -- kind of like an Optigan, no?

There would be some serious alterations, and there are also some obstacles as well. If this really was to be like an "analog redrum", that means either the samples on each tape loop would have to be going constantly, or that you'd have to use super-short tape loops. Either way, you'll have problems with how quickly each instrument can be played.

If you went with the first option and you wanted to be able to program beats as quick as, say, 64th notes -- you'd need a tape loop with your snare being played at straight 64th notes the entire time. A few problems with that method:

1) That would be a mighty short snare sample.
2) What happens if you wanted to do 16th note triplets? You'd need an entirely different spool of tape for that.
3) How would you keep all of the different tape loops synced with eachother?
4) How would you keep them synced to the control mechanism, for that matter?
5) Even if you can figure this out, you'll have to be comfortable with the idea that whenever you change tempo, you'll change pitch.

If you instead wanted to go with just an individual hit per tape loop, and keep your loops extremely short, there would be limitations to how quickly they could be played. Your machine would have to somehow "know" when each loop begins and ends, and always stop the tape after one full revolution. Remember that with this method, if your snare sample is an 1/8th note long at your tempo, you couldn't have it play 16th notes. I suppose you could double your number of tape loops, and this double your time resolution, but this also means doubling size and expense.

I say go for it -- as long as you're independently wealthy and this seems like a fun art project that would keep you excited for a couple years. Just don't expect it to be practically useable or even remotely marketable!

I see little practical benefit to this proposed Rube Goldberg contraption. Just a whole bunch of unnecessary awesome. If all this sounds too imposing, you could always just use a conventional digital sampler and record your sounds off of a reel-to-reel. In actual practice, there would be no difference in sound -- only in features and limitations.
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Justin Colletti
Audio Engineer, Journalist

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[accordion squeezist]

I used to be amazed at how fast a tape op could do a critical splice, in the time it takes to roll a cigarette.

[Brett Siler]

Composer John Oswald did a similar thing with every extreme tape edits in the late 80's. He would take a song and wildly rearrange it via tape edits to make it a new piece of it's own.

Here is one of my favorites he did of Metallica
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhU_De7FIL8

You can download the whole album for free here. It got banned shortly after it came out for copyright infringement.
http://www.plunderphonics.com/

So I don't see you you couldn't take a tape loop and just go wild with it. If you've got the time and skill, why not?
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