how can I make tape echo?

Tape Echo

Route what you want to produce an echo of to the tape deck inputs. Route the tape deck outputs to where you want the echo to go. Record and play (without setting the controls to monitor the input) at the same time. That's all there is to it.

You sort of need to look at the controls to see exactly how to set them on that particular machine, but you should be able to do it on any 3-head tape deck (including a 3-head cassette deck, incidentally).

What happens is that the record head puts a signal on the tape, then the play head (a little ways farther along the tape path, i.e. to the right) plays it back, but later by the amount of time it takes the tape to get from one head to the other.
 
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Yes, I thought it that way myself too. And if you can adjust the distance between the recordhead and the playhead, you can change the echo time. But is it then impossible to get that effect with the two-head machine ´cause my tape machine has only two heads? And what it that other (second or third) head anyways. I mean, if there´s a playhead and recordhead, what´s that third head then?
-bb-
 
Tape Echo and Heads

The three heads in a "three-head" tape deck are erase, record and play. That's the order they appear in in the tape path (well, you'd pretty much have to put the erase head first, wouldn't you?).

Most current cassette decks and some reel to reels have only two heads. There's an erase head (you really need one of those), and a dual-function record/play head. In the old days (say '70s and earlier), tape decks generally had three heads, because they hadn't got around to engineering a head that could record and also playback well. In order to record well, the heads had to have a gap that was too wide to get good high-frequency response on playback (a playback head "loses" waves that are smaller than its headgap, which makes sense if you think about it).

Eventually, the engineers got this worked out, so one head can record and also play well. This is good, because it made the sort of overdubs we now take for granted possible (you can't overdub in sync if the playback head you're listening to is in a different place on the tape from the head that's recording). Even though they didn't really need a third head, manufacturers kept putting the third head on most of their machines, partly for old-times' sake, partly because buyers figured three heads must be better than two, and partly to facilitate bias adjustments. Okay, maybe entirely to facilitate bias adjustments ... I don't know.

The machine in your link is mysterious to me, though someone with more expertise on old reel machines might know something about it. If I understand the minimal specs under it, it looks like it's a two-track mono* machine that runs only at 3 3/4 ips. This suggests that it was perhaps intended for speech, rather than music. The standard "consumer" format for music, at least from the late '60s or so, was 7 1/2 ips quarter-track stereo, with some releases in "long playing" 3 3/4. Although the machine looks pretty old, maybe it has only two heads because high frequency response wasn't considered sufficiently important for its intended use.

*I.e. it records in mono on half the tape, then you turn it over and it records on the other half in the other direction ... pretty similar to quarter-track stereo (or a cassette tape), but mono.
 
thank´s very much. Your lecture was, as I can tell, pretty much all I need to know. Now I just have to go for the search of nice old 3-head machine. Now I know what to look for. This jvc I have doesn´t seem to be that good for recording music, but luckily it was pretty cheap also. And I like kind of lo-fi sound anyway.
Thank´s much johnston. Great board this one!
-bb-
 
Actually to change the delay time you would change the speed of the tape not the distance of the heads ;)

If you could hook up a potentiometer to the motor you could have a delay time control.
 
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Damn, just done it.
 
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