question about track bouncing on tape

  • Thread starter Thread starter groucho
  • Start date Start date
Hi all - I've resolved this one fortunately. I'm now very happily using a Tascam 488, which is plenty of tracks for what I'm doing. I still am doing a wee bit of tweaking to the final stereo mix once I get it to the DAW but I think I can live with that - I mainly didn't want the puter involved in tracking/mixing.

I like the idea of doing no tweaking at all in the DAW but I haven't managed that yet - mainly because I have yet to find a hardware reverb I like as well as my old Timeworks 4080l plugin and I have yet to find a hardware compressor I like as well as the Waves RenComp.

Fucking LOVING cassette recording btw. With the dbx on there is no tape hiss at all and the sound is fantastic - especially now that I have some outboard preamps and am not dependent solely on the 488's preamps (which aren't awful, but aren't amazing either).

I am one happy recorder now. It's SOOOO fucking great using moving parts again. It makes me smile every time I sit down to mix or record. Thanks again for everyone's help in me getting this sorted out! Appreciate y'all.
 
Scott Baxendale said:
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Not only did he not mix or master on Cassette - but He dropped the Casette into some really powerful tools - then mixed it with some Powerfull Tools - then he let Bob Ludwig master it in his magical Kingdom - it bears no resemble to a cassette recording at this point.
 
Papanate said:
Not only did he not mix or master on Cassette - but He dropped the Casette into some really powerful tools - then mixed it with some Powerfull Tools - then he let Bob Ludwig master it in his magical Kingdom - it bears no resemble to a cassette recording at this point.
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I always thought that was the case too, but I’ve since heard that it’s just the cassette tape and it was all done in the machine. I’m not sure which is true?…,but it’s probably somewhere in between.
 
I love Nebraska but I always thought it was an odd one to point to in order to affirm the status of the Portastudio. Bruce's original tracks sound like exactly what they were: home recordings, which totally worked for those tunes (after a good bit of mixing and mastering).

But I've heard many other portastudio recordings that stood on their own as good quality recordings, including several by members here.
 
Here is an example of one of my early 4trk recordings. This was on a TEAC 3340S reel to reel, mixed to a cassette deck.
I didn’t have a mixer so I plugged the mics directly into the tape deck. For mixdown I had the little switch box that had 4 into 2 with (4) 3 position switches that gave you L, R, or Center for mixdown.

On this track we improvised 2 tracks then came back and improvised 2 more tracks over the first two.


 
Scott Baxendale said:
I always thought that was the case too, but I’ve since heard that it’s just the cassette tape and it was all done in the machine. I’m not sure which is true?…,but it’s probably somewhere in between.
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Here's a story about it from the Tascam site as told by Bruce's Engineer. I always come back to it from time to time and you reminded me of it: https://tascam.jp/int/support/news/481
 
Just thought I'd add an update to this in case anyone else was dealing with similar issues, since I've hit on an interesting way to utilize both digital and analog in what I'm doing.

After playing a lot with other tape formats, I've continued to be drawn back to the 4 track cassette format for a variety of reasons. I don't have any use for digital as a recording format any longer, but I've found it makes an excellent *guide* or "map" for the tracks since it has no speed variance the way tape does.

So basically, every time I record a track on the tape machine now, I am simultaneously recording a track to the DAW as well. I then use the DAW tracks as a guide to line up the tape tracks after I import them. It's a pretty quick and easy procedure and once everything's lined up I delete the DAW tracks. Simple! It allows limitless tracks that are all fairly easy to line up.

This may well be a known trick, but oddly I haven't seen anyone mention it anywhere. It doesn't accomplish my goal of having no screens at all involved in tracking but it feels like a comfortable compromise.

Hopefully all this babble is helpful to someone.:)
 
So you're dumping the cassette tracks to the DAW and trying to line up the tracks. Don't you still get speed drift? I've done that when transferring old tapes to digital and there was always a bit of speed variation so that after 4-5 minutes there was a detectable difference.

Going from a turntable did the same. I was comparing a couple of phono cartridges, so I recorded the same song with each cartridge. Even over a single song, there was a difference.


In contrast, I took a recording that I did with my Sanyo camera, and my Zoom H4n. I brought both audio tracks into Reaper, lined them up on a drum hit, and 15 minutes later they were still in sync.
 
rob aylestone said:
I have a vision now of somebody with a classic car getting a friend to also drive their brand new car on every journey just in case the classic car breaks down on the way, so if it goes wrong or starts to rattle, you can still get home?
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Haha - Yeah, that's a decent metaphor, that isn't far off from my relationship with cars.:) I detest modern vehicles and smartphones, and although my cars don't have screens, I do appreciate the GPS on my wife's smartphone when we go on trips.:)

So you're dumping the cassette tracks to the DAW and trying to line up the tracks. Don't you still get speed drift?
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It's actually very easy to quickly line up the tracks - you can mostly do it visually even. There's no way to eliminate drift when using tape, and since I continue to prefer recording to tape and mixing in the DAW, this is the most idiot-proof method I've found yet.

The "slate" method for example gives you a sound to line things up to to start with, but as we discussed earlier in the thread, everything will drift considerably over the course of a song - especially a long song.
 
I should add that the first 4 tracks are always the rhythm section (drums, bass, guitar) so that everything else is arranged in time with those first 4. It's much easier to quickly line up a vocal track say, than it would be to add, say, a drum track as the 5th (or 6th or 7th, etc.) track. And I seldom use more than 7 or 8 tracks altogether. Not sure this would be ideal for more complicated projects but my stuff is pretty simple mostly.
 
TalismanRich said:
Yeah, everyone brings up Nebraska as being the quintessential work on cassette. He did it as a demo on his cassette portastudio because it was done in Jan 1982! He didn't intend it to be release that way.
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All in all the Teac 144 wasn’t that bad of a recording device - it captured the sound okay - it was in the Mastering stage that the album started to shine - and even then it took a lot of effort to get it to Vinyl - like you I never like the album that much - Songs were okay - but the sound of it -Woof!
 
rob aylestone said:
I have a vision now of somebody with a classic car getting a friend to also drive their brand new car on every journey just in case the classic car breaks down on the way, so if it goes wrong or starts to rattle, you can still get home?
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That classic car must have been an MG :ROFLMAO:
 
The annual Street Rod Nationals are held locally. It's a sight to see! There are thousands of old cars, and occasionally you see a truck with a trailer behind a cool rod just in case. However, most of them drive in and around town without issue. Once in a while you'll see one on the side of the road with the hood up.

SRNats.webp


I guess you do what you need to do.
 
groucho said:
It's actually very easy to quickly line up the tracks - you can mostly do it visually even. There's no way to eliminate drift when using tape, and since I continue to prefer recording to tape and mixing in the DAW, this is the most idiot-proof method I've found yet.

The "slate" method for example gives you a sound to line things up to to start with, but as we discussed earlier in the thread, everything will drift considerably over the course of a song - especially a long song.
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If you get any drift, how do you fix any sync problems? Remember early in this thread, I got 0.7 seconds drift over a 6 minute song transferring from a cassette. That's a LOT, and very noticeable. Do you simply put a marker at the beginning and end and then stretch the file in the DAW so that the two line up on both ends?

When I have recorded events with my camera and my Zoom R24, there is some variation in the clocks. It's a known issue with the Zoom, and surprisingly the H4n doesn't have the same issue. When I've done multitrack mixes and then mate it up with the video, I usually synced the audio with a visual drum strike around the middle so that there is less of a visual discrepancy vs the audio at the start and end. It's not much but noticeable after enough time. It also means that each song has to be done individually, there's more work.

With the H4n audio, I sync up the beginning and it's still in sync after 1 hour. Then I can simple align the two files, and chop out songs quickly. Of course the tradeoff is that I don't have the extra channels to work with.
 
The H4 and H4n are notoriously bad at 44.1 kHz, but known to be pretty good at 48 kHz. The H4n Pro evidently corrected that. My H5 is pretty good, but even my cameras vary. My Sonys are seem to line up for an hour or more, but my GoPros drift a little over an hour. Since the GoPros produce a bunch of separate files, I calculate the number or frames they drift and spread the correction evenly over the recording. The H5 seems to line up well to the Sony cameras. Recordings done on my UI24R need to be adjusted to fit. I just find two distinct points, one near the beginning and one near the end, and squeeze/stretch the audio as needed.

Adding analog variation to that process would be maddening. At least digital is consistently off when it's off.
 
Honestly, it would most likely make no difference for Youtube videos if I just used Reaper's stretch function to make the R-24 audio to mate up with the video's audio track. It's not like any of these are commercial recordings. It would make things a lot easier.

At the last event, I had limited room for equipment, so I used the H4n. It was better than the camera audio, but not nearly as good as I got previous times with the R-24.

If I was doing this consistently, the Tascam 24 or 2400 would be a far better way to go. Plenty of channels, one unit, and can double as the PA mixing board for the vocals. But for the occasional use that I have, it just isn't practical.

In some respects, this makes me appreciate the effort that went into things like Woodstock, Monterey Pop and other film/tape productions.
 
One nice thing about the H5 (and H6) is that the mics are on a removable module that can be replaced with a dual XLR input module (or a mid-side or shotgun mic). I'm using mine right now to record a play for the videographer. Overhead mic is on one channel, sound effects are on a stereo pair.

20250821_202617.webp
 
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