A cool way to integrate analog tape with your DAW

[Brad McGowan]

I came up with this system earlier this year when I acquired my first tape deck. A friend and I finally got around to making a video demonstrating the system this weekend. I posted on Gearslutz and thought I would share here too since I know there are a lot of guys here that love the sound of tape. If there are one or two guys that get inspired to dust off their tape decks and start using them alongside their DAWs then the world would be a better place.

Basically what I demonstrate shows how you can track through tape in real-time and have it automatically be aligned when it is captured by the DAW. It allows you to use multiple tape decks even at different speeds, and record some of your tracks straight to the DAW and others through the tape deck. Everything winds up in the computer and no dumping from tape is required after the fact, nor do you have to manually align tracks. You can even take advantage of retrospective record features while tracking to the tape. So you get the sound of tape and all the conveniences of digital recording at the same time. Oh, and the best part - you don't need any special hardware to do this. So it's basically free assuming you have a tape deck, a DAW, and a mixer or patchbay.

Let me know what you think. I'd like to make some more videos to refine and clarify the process. Oh yeah--if anyone knows how to get a direct feed from the computer screen into the movie, please let me know.

http://www.youtube.com/user/redwagonstudio

thanks,
Brad

p.s. Is it possible to embed YouTube vides in posts here?

[signorMars]

that's pretty clever. if only i had a tape machine! someday maybe... also, props for making a good instructional video. very few people can pull that off, regardless of the topic.

[Brad McGowan]

Thanks! Believe it or not this is my first attempt at making a video. It was much harder than I expected, especially since we didn't script it out ahead of time. I just kind of winged it and tried my best to speak clearly.

I'd love for someone to give it a try with their setup and let me know how it works out.

Brad

[JohnDavisNYC]

that is clever... i am going to be the asshole who asks 'what's so hard about just recording to tape?' you've done this well, and i'm glad it works for you, but if i want to use tape, it is so much easier to just track to tape, get the take, do some overdubs, and then dump later (if at all!!! ) for overdubs beyond the analog track count...

i suppose this is a really great solution for someone like yourself, however, with only 10 tracks total of tape (AWESOME MCI 1"8tk, by the way...) to get analog sounds on every single track, but for someone with a 16 or 24 tk, i feel like setting all this software routing and monitoring and not knowing what the sound is actually like coming off tape, is too much hassle for me.

i totally commend you for your success and obvious hard work, but it still seems kinda wierd to me... i don't want to have to keep rewinding tape all the time, if i still have to stare at a stupid computer screen... the freedom of analog, in terms of having to use your ears and not having to stare at a screen and use a mouse, seems to be lost, to me.

anyway, not trying to be grumpy about your cool discovery, i guess i am just someone who 'doesn't get it' in terms of what is so inconvenient about using a tape machine in the traditional sense, and then transferring when the time comes... but then, i like to stay analog as long as possible, so my personal recording approach is philosophically at odds with this technique... soooo... what am i talking about?

great job, and good video!

grumpy purist,
john

[Rodgre]

I'm watching the clips now, but I wanted to make a mention of an issue that I'm not sure if you cover or not.

You must make sure that if you're recording a multiple-mic instrument, like drums for example, that you don't split some through tape then to digital, and the rest straight to digital.

When you align the tracks to the start of the song, you will hear all sorts of incurable phasing artifacts throughout the song, as the analog deck is constantly varying its speed very slightly. You may not hear things drift way out of time, but you will hear constant phasing against other tracks not recorded through the tape.

I learned this the hard way by tracking kick, snare and bass DI through a 1/2" 8-track, then back to an Alesis HD-24 with the rest of the basic tracks, and when I aligned the taped kick and snare with the other tracks, they were constantly phasing against the overhead and tom tracks. Had I tracked ALL the drum tracks through the tape, it wouldn't have been an issue (unless I had other tracks with bleed from the drums on straight-digital tracks) but doing some and not all, it was a wasted experiment.

Roger

[Brad McGowan]

I'm watching the clips now, but I wanted to make a mention of an issue that I'm not sure if you cover or not.

You must make sure that if you're recording a multiple-mic instrument, like drums for example, that you don't split some through tape then to digital, and the rest straight to digital.

When you align the tracks to the start of the song, you will hear all sorts of incurable phasing artifacts throughout the song, as the analog deck is constantly varying its speed very slightly. You may not hear things drift way out of time, but you will hear constant phasing against other tracks not recorded through the tape.

Actually that has not necessarily been my experience although I do agree with you in theory. When I am recording basic tracks I often have some of my drum tracks like room mics or tom mics just going straight to digital alongside the other drum tracks that hit the tape. There is no phasing to be heard (maybe it's just extremely hard since they are mostly transient sounds). Even though in theory the analog tape deck is varying its speed, in practice the amount of tape speed variation may be a sample at most. I've done some tests where I've looped a short sine wave blip through the deck and recorded like 10-15 passes of it. When I zoom in all of them are alligned and there is no variation at all. I intend to do some more tests with a bigger statistical sample set. It's possible that with an instrument making long sustained notes that you may notice some phasing. When doing multiple mics on a guitar for instance, I do put both tracks on the same tape deck.

Anyway--I never hear any phasing with my drum tracks. You should give the system a try and let me know if you experience otherwise.

thanks,
Brad

[Brad McGowan]

that is clever... i am going to be the asshole who asks 'what's so hard about just recording to tape?' you've done this well, and i'm glad it works for you, but if i want to use tape, it is so much easier to just track to tape, get the take, do some overdubs, and then dump later (if at all!!! ) for overdubs beyond the analog track count...

i suppose this is a really great solution for someone like yourself, however, with only 10 tracks total of tape (AWESOME MCI 1"8tk, by the way...) to get analog sounds on every single track, but for someone with a 16 or 24 tk, i feel like setting all this software routing and monitoring and not knowing what the sound is actually like coming off tape, is too much hassle for me.

i totally commend you for your success and obvious hard work, but it still seems kinda wierd to me... i don't want to have to keep rewinding tape all the time, if i still have to stare at a stupid computer screen... the freedom of analog, in terms of having to use your ears and not having to stare at a screen and use a mouse, seems to be lost, to me.

anyway, not trying to be grumpy about your cool discovery, i guess i am just someone who 'doesn't get it' in terms of what is so inconvenient about using a tape machine in the traditional sense, and then transferring when the time comes... but then, i like to stay analog as long as possible, so my personal recording approach is philosophically at odds with this technique... soooo... what am i talking about?

great job, and good video!

grumpy purist,
john

Hey John,

I realize that some purists out there are really tied to their tried and true old school methods of recording to tape. And that's totally cool. I'm not trying to persuade anyone to come over to the dark side of ITB recording. What I'm proposing is a solution for those of us that want the tape sound, but want to work in a non-linear digital realm while enjoying all the conveniences of precise punch-ins, cycle recording, zero rewinding between takes, retrospective record, unlimited multiple takes, etc.

Let me clarify a little bit as I respond to your points. I know there are probably others reading this wondering the same thing.

If I wanted to track to tape and overdub old school I would need, an analog console, performers that can play well, multiple reels of tape for multiple takes, and time to rewind and locate punch in points for overdubs. When you typically record using a computer you don't need any of those (sad to say regarding the performers). With the system I've worked out, you can record to the computer as many of us are used to, while having some or all of your tracks hit as many different tape decks and tape formulations as you would like. And you don't have to rewind, change reels, or be limited by the amount of tape you have on hand. I've personally been using the same couple reels of tape since this past winter.

Regarding rewinding the tape....you can totally leave the tape running even if you are not recording on the computer or if you are playing back from the computer. The only time you must stop and rewind your tape deck is when you are at the end of the reel. So that occurs every 30 minutes for me running at 15 ips. So in that 30 minutes I could track a song, do a bunch of overdubs, load up a template for new song and do another couple takes. If I was tracking all that in an old-school analog fashion I probably would have already rewound the tape a number of times and/or switched out reels.

Basically this allows you to offer your clients, your band, or yourself the best sound possible (analog tape) while recording using modern ITB approaches. If you make records best while working 100% OTB with a console and tape deck then you have my utmost respect and envy.

Thanks for the feedback and the compliments.

Brad

[JohnDavisNYC]

well, calling myself a purist was partly in jest, as i am in the process of modifying our DAW rig to run alongside tape or radar and return via a sidecar/summing mixer to the mix buss of our console....

i would be wary of the phase stuff.... eyes are not the most powerful tool in terms of judging the phase accuracy of your system... try recording identical signals and then flip the phase on one... if you can get it to fully null, my guess would be that you will hear it flutter in and out of the null while it plays... 15ips would have a wider margin of error, so i would watch out for that... a good rule of thumb would be to not print phase critical sources (i.e. drums) through multiple tape machines... but, YMMV. the clip on playback did sound phasey, but i am going to credit that to the camera mic...

anyway, back to my post, and your response...

i think the only real thing that makes your system work is for people who don't have a console... the amount of time spent to track basics and do some overdubs on a tape machine takes no longer than with a DAW... i've already rolled back for the OD or punch by the time the guitarist has finished scratching his ass...

but anyway, yes, i feel like i do make the best recordings 100% otb on tape, but very rarely have the luxury to do so... and i commend you on figuring out a great way to use a free plugin to make your tape machine integrate with your DAW in such a manner.

rock and roll,
john

[newfuturevintage]

Hey Brad-- thanks for the videos, very fun.

I used to do a lot of this sort of thing when my CPUs weren't up to the task of tracking a full band, and I've also done this sort of thing by routing pre-recorded digital tracks out to analog, looping through in repro, then slip aligning. I used to get a LOT of flanging. That was a lot of the charm though, and often what I was going for.

The less accurate the deck, the worse the flanging is. I was using a 1/4" tascam 4-track, and it was pretty awful. For things that don't need to be phase aligned, it wasn't a biggie.

There's a convoluted semi-solution when working with only one deck: Have a SMPTE generator, and a word clock generator slaved to SMPTE.
While you're recording, stripe a tape track with smpte. This feeds (in repro) into a word clock generator that's referenced to SMPTE. Your soundcard gets slaved to this word clock. It'll cause your DAW to follow the speed changes on the deck.

It was ages ago when I did this, but I used an Opcode 64xtc to do it. Should be able to pick one up for ~$30 now. Driver support for this is dead, but all the needed functionality is available from the front panel. This is the word clock generator. Anything that'll generate SMPTE (that's not coming out of the recording soundcard) can serve as the SMPTE source.

[curtiswyant]

Thanks so much for posting this. I've been wanting to do something like this with my Tascam 22-4 (1/4" 4 track) but couldn't spare a track for SMPTE. I'm recording drums to 4 tape tracks while listening to a scratch track in digital. I tried it out and it seems to work great so far. One minor problem is that I can't fine-tune the level from the tape deck output into the DAW like I normally would when dumping. I'll be experimenting with this. THANK YOU again!

[Rodgre]

There is no phasing to be heard (maybe it's just extremely hard since they are mostly transient sounds). Even though in theory the analog tape deck is varying its speed, in practice the amount of tape speed variation may be a sample at most.
Brad

I think it's great that this system is working for you with no phase issues. I just didn't have that experience at all. Drum attacks might be thought of as transient sounds, but even a transient can be very much destroyed by phase issues. Cymbals are not only transient, and can be really messy with phasing.

Let me be clear: I'm not disputing your system if it is working for you. I think it's really a great thing, if it is. I'm just offering my experience from trying a similar experiment which had a bad result. In my case, if I brought the faders up on the straight-to-digital overheads, with the "aligned" tape snare, I would hear snares randomly disappearing as they were warbling around in and out of phase with the overheads. Luckily, I had a straight-to-digital version of the snare track (which was even worse in its phase issues with respect to the aligned tape snare) to use.

When I am aligning tracks by eye, I usually get it as close as my eye will allow, and then I may insert a tiny delay plug in on one or both tracks, varying the timing by microseconds until they sound the most coherent (flipping the phase and adjusting the delay to get them to cancel as much as possible is part of my process).

It could be that the Otari 8-Track I was using was more fluttery than some others.

Roger

[Brad McGowan]

I want to thank Roger, John, and newfuturevintage for bringing up the potential phase concern when using multiple recording mediums. It's an excellent point that certainly needs to be addressed and paid attention to. I certainly agree with you guys that the best practice is to keep all multi-miked instruments hitting the same medium to avoid potential phasing problems due to wow and flutter. In other words, it's a good practice to send all drum mics to one tape deck if possible. Or send your two guitar mics to the same tape deck.

What's strange is that I've done a bunch of recordings only sending my overheads to a 1/4" machine and the rest of the drums straight to the DAW and those drum tracks sound totally fine to me. You would think you would notice all sorts of swirly weirdness especially on the cymbals, but nothing is jumping out at me. Perhaps I'm just blessed with a tape deck that is peforming very well mechanically (it's an Otari MX55 by the way).

I think the key thing is to always use your ears. If you hear something not right, then make an adjustment somewhere.

John--by the way, the sound of the drum tracks weren't the best, especially after the video got published and compressed. To be honest I just had my buddy put mics somewhere. I have no idea where he placed them or what he was even using. If it had been a real session I likely would have moved the mics around to achieve a sound I felt was more in phase. To save time making the video, I didn't want to spend too much effort with mic placement. Next time I'll try to figure out how to feed the audio directly into the video and I'll be sure to capture some better tones. Thanks for the feedback!

Brad

[Al_Huero]

I do a variation of this without the auto alignment--I've just figured out the delay between the record and repro heads at the speed I'm using and slide the tape tracks back by that amount after tracking. I'm working with an 8-track machine, so in some cases I'll have room mics or other drum mics going straight to the DAW, and I haven't noticed any phase issues either.

[newfuturevintage]

The thought comes to mind that there's two possible sources of phase issues:

1. those induced by tape speed variance
and
2. those caused by poor alignment of analog to digital tracks (assuming one analog deck).

In case 1, if the distance between the Record and Repro heads is 1", at 15ips, that's 1/15th of a second, or 66.66 (repeating) ms. If you've got a solid deck it shouldn't be that big a deal. At 30ips, even less a deal. If you've got an unstable deck like I used to, it's a big deal.

In case #2, I think this could be minimized by doing a bunch of pings to measure the timing difference between direct digital and tape-to-digital tracks and averaging them before setting up the latency compensation.

using word clock to account for the drift, though, I think would compensate for both cases.

Brad--I'm just a little bit north of you, PM me if you're interested in testing with the WC unit.

[Beneficial]

Am I right in thinking this plug-in only works when recording at 44100? I tried this last night at 88200 but my delay was over 12,000 samples long and it looks like the max compensation with the plug-in is 10,000 samples. Cool idea though... hoping they release a new version of this.

By the way, anyone know if the plug-in would change the quality of your recording? Does it actually process the sound or does it just leave the wave file 'as is' once it hits your converters and just shifts it?