slamming a 1/4" reel

[Drumbeast]

I have this old Sony 1/4" 2 track reel laying around and i want to put it to use. My plan is to send my kick and snare track from mic to preamp to reel to adat; in hopes to get this smooth natural compression everyone talks about. I have no reel to reel experience (i can thread it and play it). What i want to know is, to get this natural compression, do the tracks need to be in the red on the reel? Or is the nature of the reel itself that makes the compression. I'm going to start experimenting. If it works well I hope to get a 4 track reel and run my kick, snare, overhead, and bass track through it into the adat. Any suggestions on a 4 track reel that would be good? Any pointers on this setup in general?

[EasyGo]

What i want to know is, to get this natural compression, do the tracks need to be in the red on the reel? Or is the nature of the reel itself that makes the compression.

I would say both are true. You just get more aggressive compression as you begin to hit the tape at higher levels (the fun part).

[Al]

It will certainly help out in the warmth department, some of my friends do this with their cassette porta studios before going on to p.c. with cubase or whatever it is their using, makes sense!.

Of course i prefer printing straight to tape,no question about it!!

Oh! and some of the old teac 4 track open reel decks sound the business,if you can find one in good condition,you would pick it up fairly cheap too

[A.David.MacKinnon]

For this to work you have to send the signal from the repro (or playback) head to your ADAT. Because of the time it takes for the recorded tape to move from the record head to the play head there will be a bit of a delay. This will mean your kick and snare will be out of time with the rest of your kit and any overdubs you do through the reel to reel will be out of time with the rest of the song.

[Al]

This much is true,i forgot to add that they use their portastudios as a mixer only before recording to p.c.,dont know what difference it would make to adat though?!.

I would personally sell the adat and get a decent 8 track analogue machine,but that's just my opinion!.

[Drumbeast]

I didnt think of that delay part. It has RCA ins and outs, i was going to hook up to those. There is a switch that says "Monitor: Source or Tape." Is that where i would select the right one to have no delay? If so, which one should I use? Also, there is a switch for 7 1/2 isp or 3 1/4 isp. Which one would sound better? Al: I want to get a nice analog 8 track deck, but they need alot of care. My hopes with this cheap little reel to reel I have now is to learn reels, how they work, and all that. Then graduate to somthing bigger (I have my eyes out for a tascam 388).

[super skoda]

To get the sound of the tape you will want to monitor off the tape. To get the sound with out delay, you will want to monitor off the source. (I think).

How hard you hit the tape will depend on how you want it to sound. If you peak too hard it will distort in a bad way. But if you hit the tape just right it will distort in an awesome way (I really like the sound of clean bass guitar when the VU meter is slammed to the right yet doesn't really peak.) If you don't really hit the tape hard, keeping it at about 0db, It will probably just sound like a clean recording.

I have a tascam 388 ($500.00) that I have never had serviced. It's been about a year and it sounds just fine to me but then again I don't have a golden ear. (I got stuck with skin and cartilage type of ear). I have heard a lot of people on this board say that the Tascams don't need much maintenance. They are kind of made so you can drag them around and record and not have to align the heads every time.

Good luck.

[chemicalpink]

sadly, you will not be able get the tape sound without delay
you could just record the whole kit with the sony then dump
it on the adat, but I would sell the fire hazard and buy a good
reel to reel, there is a reason why all these big guys refuse
to work without them.

[A.David.MacKinnon]

[sadly, you will not be able get the tape sound without delay]

This is the truth. If you monitor off of the source you you won't get the sound of the tape you'll just get the sound of the shitty sony pre-amp.
The best thing to do if you want to the sound of tape in your Adat set up is to synch an analog 8 track (or 4 track) up with your ADAT. I did this for years and it can work very well.[/quote]

[leigh]

sadly, you will not be able get the tape sound without delay

Unless unless unless: you didn't mention what kind of ADAT you have. Some have the ability to delay any of their tracks by whichever values you choose. So, you could run you reel-to-reel in repro mode, and bounce back to ADAT...now your bounced tracks are delayed by 50 ms or whatever, depending on head spacing and tape speed. So fix the problem by delaying the other six tracks of the ADAT by that amount, and then everything lines up.

Good luck...

Leigh

[Drumbeast]

Man that sucks. junkshop; how did you sync the reel to the adat? That may be cool. Or maybe i'll get an 8 track reel and dump to adat like that. I normaly do 5 tracks live, 3 drum, guitar and bass.I like my adats (LX20's by the way). I'm good at fixing and maintaining them. And i love having tapes to switch back and forth when doing multiple seesions (more than one band). Syncing a 4 track reel to the adats would be awesome. Maybe someone saw my post last week about 12 track recorders: I want to sync somthing to my adat and sell one of them. I rarely if ever use all 16 tracks.