One of the tests we did for radio was speech. Taking an important speech, like a prime minister or president and cutting the tape and rearranging it to make them say things they didn’t! People who really got editing could take a few of their speeches on different subjects and make them say totally different things. So good that nobody could detect it. One of the reasons why police stations were equipped with dual cassette recorders so the accused person had exactly the same tape recording as the prosecutors, to stop the editing. Many broadcast reel to reels had record controls and meters removed and the new blank panel fitted with a splicing block. 45, 60 and 90 degree grooves in an aluminium block. A reel of splicing tape (like sellotape, but much less sticky and squishy glue) and some leader tape in nice colours. razor blades were single sided, so you didn’t slice your fingers and the damn things could get magnetised so every edit went click! Idiots would splice a tape with ordinary sellotape sometimes, and after a month, your layers were glued together, ripping the tape, contaminating the heads, the guides and even the spool. Yuk! Oh yes, and your edit points were marked on the back of tape with a chinagraph pencil, a sort of early waxy sharpie. Radio broadcasters were amazingly quick and accurate, chopping out the sound bites and getting rid of filler.
one other test was editing out every um, er, and “you know” that some people say all the time. It would then be fun to take all these removed ers and ups, and ‘you knows’ and rejoin them. Electronic editing is now common and really simple, but old style razor edits could do quite amazing things. It was above my skill level, but I’ve seen overlap edits done on a stereo half track, where left and right tracks are edited an inch or so apart. A half cut on one side another maybe an inch away on the other side and the. A lengthwise slice down the middle. Cutting through two overlapping layers of tape. That was impressive editing.
worst thing with this kind of edit are failed splices. You take the tape off the shelf and the tape joints have failed on every edit, and the tape comes apart.
oh yes, and we always stored reel to reels tail out at the end, so print through from one layer to the next which sort of produced an echo of something loud on the layer touching it, would come after the event, not before it. Music that started quiet, then suddenly had a big drum hit were the worst. After a few months in store, the loud drum hit would be faintly audible over the quiet bit. Store at the end, and that is less problematic as the phantom echo comes after the music, not before it.
I’d forgotten all this stuff. The annoying thing with storing tapes tail out at the end is when you don’t know, so thread it up and discover it’s playing backwards!
