DAW to Tape conversion

[silver22]

Hi everyone - I'm fairly new to recording and was hoping someone out there could help me.

I'm just messing around with a recording I did in Ableton, and I'd like to try to bounce it to tape to see what it sounds like. For my interface I'm using a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 and my tape machine is a Tascam TSR 8.

Any ideas on how I would go about doing this?

 

[jpmorris]

Depends how many tracks there are in your DAW project. If you're trying to do a back-and-forth bounce, ultimately what you do is mix it down to an 8-track stem mix, and record those 8 channels onto the TSR-8, with or without DBX. With DBX will sound cleaner, but that might not necessarily be the point of the exercise.

Once it's recorded, you then play it back into the DAW, digitizing 8 new channels.

Be aware that the edge tracks (1 and 8) are more prone to damage or dropouts than the central 6.

You could instead record a stereo mix, but this isn't the best machine for that because the tracks are narrower than they would be on a 1/4" 2-track mastering deck.

 

[miroslav]

Next time reocrd to the tape deck and then dump it into the DAW....you'll get more tape/analog "flavor" that way than going to DAW first.

 

[kip4]

You must spread some rep around before giving it to Miroslav again

 

[miroslav]

There's nothing really bad/wrong about bouncing from DAW to tape, I've done that with individual tracks on occasion when I wanted to smooth them out some....but if you are multi-tracking from scratch, you do get a little more analog mileage if you hit tape first, then dump DAW....and it's a bit more logical to do that it that way (especially if you know you are going to want to hit tape) since it saves you one set of D/A - A/D conversions.