New project

Badger

Active member
My father came back from a reunion recently with a metric crap load of old qtr reel to reel tapes. These were stuff my grandfather, and my father recorded 20-40 years ago, and my goal is to try to clean up these old recordings and burn them on CD. I have an old TEAC reel 2 reel, I plan on running this straight into my Delta, then editing it in soundforge, spliting it into seperate wav files, and burning it from there. My dad was a country player/singer many years ago, and grandfather was not to shabby a player himself. I found this picture of my dad performing back in the fifties I suppose, and belive it or not he still has that old gibson you see in the picture.

Anyway, anybody here ever done something like this, and any suggestions?
 

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I have some old (up to 25 years) cassettes that I've been transfering to CD. Wavelab has been a big help to me, espically the "mastering" section. It rally pulled out some sound lost on the tape. There are a lot of plugins like Direct X which will help get rid of the tape hiss. Good luck. This kind of project can be a lot of fun.
 
zbert said:
I have some old (up to 25 years) cassettes that I've been transfering to CD. Wavelab has been a big help to me, espically the "mastering" section. It rally pulled out some sound lost on the tape. There are a lot of plugins like Direct X which will help get rid of the tape hiss. Good luck. This kind of project can be a lot of fun.

Some of these tapes are 50 years old or more. And I hate to think what kind of mic they used...Just whatever came with the tape machine I'm sure. Ive heard some of my grandfathers playing, and I'm really looking forward to cleaning it up a bit so I can listen to it. Maybe Ill post some before/after
 
One thing to keep an eye on when you are transferring these tapes is oxide separation. The oxide layer will flake and peel off of the mylar backing material. I have unfortunately experienced this on tapes that were nowhere near as old as the tapes you are working with. There is a solution if you run into this problem. Eddie Ciletti has a description of baking tapes on his site: http://www.tangible-technology.com/tape/baking1.html . Definitely worth checking out. Good luck on your project.

Mark
 
rhythm ranch said:
One thing to keep an eye on when you are transferring these tapes is oxide separation. The oxide layer will flake and peel off of the mylar backing material. I have unfortunately experienced this on tapes that were nowhere near as old as the tapes you are working with. There is a solution if you run into this problem. Eddie Ciletti has a description of baking tapes on his site: http://www.tangible-technology.com/tape/baking1.html . Definitely worth checking out. Good luck on your project.

Mark

Thanks for the info, rythm ranch. I will check that out. I also plan on cleaning the heads after each tape, since I fear these tapes may have started to go south. They havent been exactly stored in a climate controled enviroment
 
Be sure that you dump the music to a safe storage medium on your first pass.

Several years ago I had a client that brought in a Velvet Underground cassette that was 20+ years old. They wanted to do the same as you did and try to restore the quality.

I dumped the 2tk stero cassette to 12 stero pairs on a old 2inch machine and proceeded to EQ/Compress each channel for a specific section or insturment.

It came out really well. They actually sounded better after I was finished than they did live. (Dating myself aren't I).

If I had access to a PT or similar system it would have been a lot easier.

Go for it.

DA
 
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