Remixing old mono tapes

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Garagerock

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Any tips on remixing old one mic mono rehearsaltapes ? Thinking about signal splitting and of course eq and saturation .
 
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I recommend dumping them immediately to digital and working from there. Depending on the condition of the tapes, you might get 0 plays or 100 plays from them depending on the type and age of the tape (do they have sticky shed issues?). Are there any splices? I can tell you from experience that 30-50 yr old splicing tape is going to fail (I redid about a half dozen of them last year while recovering some old tapes)

Why would you want to add "saturation" to a one mic mono tape? All you are doing is distorting the original sound. Most people want to recover as much of what is there as possible. You already have all you "tape mojo" on the tape (whatever that happens to mean. I have yet to see a "% Mojo" spec on any tape deck) At least if you have a good capture of the original tape, you can abuse it however you want. Dump it to a new tape at +10db so you get lots THD ... er sorry, saturation. Run it through a tube pre for more saturation, dump more eq on it to bring out the hiss, and add more wow and flutter.

I don't know how much you have to "remix" but have you priced tape lately? 10.5" x1/4" reels are about $75-100 a pop. The half inch tapes for your 80-8 are about $100 to $150 per reel (do you need it on a reel or just pancakes?) You get a whopping 30 minutes of recording time with a 2500 ft reel..

I bring all this up because you have asked a lot of very basic questions, things that anyone with experience would know. I wonder if you really understand what the consequences of going "all analog" really are. Before you sink 3 or 4 thousand $$$ into buying equipment that needs to be maintained (calibrated, cleaned and aligned) you need to understand where you are going. You wouldn't recommend that a first time guitar student sink $20,000 buying a vintage Strat and another $5000 buying a vintage SuperLead, would you?
 
It is even worse just audio tapes. But they sound great with some eq. Not so without. In a very large room they sounded ace threw old giant speakers with tube drivers after an early 70s mixer. But that setup is gone but would have been interesting when re-recorded.
Yeah more than 5 or so reel to reel tapes is questionable. They work real nice always used again. It is mainly the workflow and just guitar drums bass nothing too complex. Not that they sound dull … it is like a vocal and voice thing in the upper mids…
 
I don't know about Spectra Layers, but I know that in Spleeter and Demucs you will just end up with mono stems. However, you can then apply stereo effects to just one stem rather than the whole recording which may sound more natural. Typically you could add some panned short delays to guitars or keyboards to make them sound more stereo while keeping drums, bass and vocals in the middle.
 
My bandmates setup was real stunning audio from a cassette tape. My best results are hitting it hard threw a desk early 60s style sound like the sonics. Both work but getting it to such awesome refined sound was due to the mass of the speakers and room and that of course changes the thing so drastically and I am kind of forced to a sound that is not what I would do had I still access to that hall. It was more that 70s sound most people prefer. I do not but of course the raw sound does the music less justice and takes the open relaxed space.
 
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Garagerock said:
It is even worse just audio tapes. But they sound great with some eq. Not so without. In a very large room they sounded ace threw old giant speakers with tube drivers after an early 70s mixer. But that setup is gone but would have been interesting when re-recorded.
Yeah more than 5 or so reel to reel tapes is questionable. They work real nice always used again. It is mainly the workflow and just guitar drums bass nothing too complex. Not that they sound dull … it is like a vocal and voice thing in the upper mids…
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hmmm. I might be able to recreate the vibe of EQ balancing + in a large room through some good speakers (that you could perceive listening in buds or a sound bar or whatever you've got). Would you want to explore that?
 
Just transfer the tapes to your DAW and then you can clean them up and process them with EQ and compression. Keep the original digital transfers so you can always go back to the source material. As far as extracting isolated tracks from an already mixed mono or stereo. I think there are some newish AI tools that can magically achieve that, but I have no experience there.
 
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