Recording "hot".

F

frosty55

Member
I have a Teac 80-8, that I want to use to tape my band. I was wondering about outboard compressors, but have recently read about recording signals to tape, "hot".
Can I use this method for everything?
We are drums, bass, guitars, vocals doing the heavy rock stuff.
What isnt advisable to tape "hot"?
 
well ...... tape is more forgiving than digital when you occassionally bump into the red.
Depending on what you're recording .... you might not notice any bad effects from it.
And you get better signal to noise if you record hot.
I used to almost always record with the meter right up around 0db and often bumping into the red.
Some instruments can suffer from the distortion ...... in my experience mostly delicate stuff like acoustic instruments and high freqs.
Electric stuff often desires a certain amount of distortion so if the tape saturates and adds a bit it doesn't really hurt anything.
You'll just have to experiment but it's definitely not like digital where you want to usually stay down around -12db.
 
I agree with Lt. Bob. It could work on certain things...not everything and especially not bass. This is a really touchy machine...not very forgiving at all.
The 80-8 sounds 1975 to my ears - after all that's when it was designed. Much later than the 60s gear that spoiled eveybody (ie that's why so many came to hate the 70s sound). The 60s gear was so good that you could distort and look forward to harmonious results. The linearity of tube distortion cannot be rivaled.

80-8 on the other hand could probably sound wild, but with a great vintage compressor like the DBX 162 on the stereo buss. Sometimes when I record guitars direct in the board, distortion of the 80-8 sounds nice...most of the time this over-modulation isn't desireable tho.

I like tracking most instruments as clean as I can before overloading, and then lay the vocal tracks down distorted. It gives it sort of a prehistoric sound- but never expect the same results twice with this machine. Sometimes tracking vocals sounds light airy and sharp. Sometimes it just sounds like mud. A lot of this stuff is out of our hands - no matter how hard we try we're subject to every variable you can think of
 
I just want to point out that 0db in the analog world is the level you are supposed to be running at. That isn't a hot level. A hot level would be having the needle always above 0dbVU
 
It's kind of a loaded question, but occasional creative use notwithstanding, generally you want to keep the levels hitting no hotter than 0VU. Tape is forgiving and you can get away with the odd peak a little above that but keep in mind that solid state electronics in particular are not so forgiving as has been pointed out and you're best to keep that needle within the marked range for sure. As with anything else, you'll generally do well and achieve the best depth and clarity when not running yourself out of headroom all the time, especially with fast transients such as cymbals etc where you're recording hotter peaks than the VUs are able to actually show.

Generally there are better ways to achieve intentional sonic distortions either at the source or after the fact with signal processing.

Now mind you, even keeping analog levels around 0VU is still a far more forgiving scenario than digital recording where you're gonna be squaring off transients if you're hitting hotter than -6dBfs.
 
briank said:
Now mind you, even keeping analog levels around 0VU is still a far more forgiving scenario than digital recording where you're gonna be squaring off transients if you're hitting hotter than -6dBfs.
Click to expand...
Not if you are peaking at -6dbfs. That's only .1db into the last bit. You are really no where near clipping anything.
 
Farview said:
Not if you are peaking at -6dbfs. That's only .1db into the last bit. You are really no where near clipping anything.
Click to expand...

But in the real world of recording, it's entirely possible to clip transient peaks when a dig. meter is showing -6dBfs, source depending...
 
That depends on the ballistics of the meter. Inter-sample clipping can only happen when the level is much higher. Any transient that would get lost between samples would be at a frequency above nyquist and would be filtered out anyway.
 
Going +3 sounds very nice on drums. In my experience it's fine if a few instruments are peaking around +3 but if they all do it you end up with a shambolic and distorted sound. At least its like that on my Fostexes, the Teac might be a different kind of thing.

This morning I successfully went to +6 on a mixdown which sounded great and almost only added compression. But maybe the reason why it worked was that I was using a RMGI tape that is not calibrated for my Fostex Model 80 and the actual peak level is lower?
 
Farview said:
That depends on the ballistics of the meter.
Click to expand...

LOL right, so watch a ProTools channel meter for a while and tell me how much you want to trust it ;)

In any event, the argument is fruitful for the OP in that it underscores the importance of meter ballistics in judging how to handle signal level.
 
Can't you adjust the ballistics in ProTools? In all the Daws I've used, you could adjust the ballistics and how many consecutive full scale samples it takes to turn on the clip light.

Either way, on playback the meters should be accurate because it can look ahead to see what the file is.
 
My humble advice: don't trust the meters, use your ears. Put the machine in repro mode so you can hear exactly what effect the tape is having on the sound, and start pushing the levels. Keep pushing until it begins to break up and distort, and then back off just a little bit. You want to straddle the threshold between sweet saturation and total break-up.
 
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