tape effects ala eddie kramer

[damiza20]

i bought the Hendrix studio book to see if i could pick up tips and tricks from eddie kramer. in there he brings up flanging, phasing and sound on sound. i've been trying to figure out how to do the phasing on tracks like bold as love but i'm not quite sure and i'm not really sure on how to flange the tape. i get that you touch the supply reel or the pinch roller but i get lost when it says that i make a copy and all that. also when he says sound on sound is that talking about tape loops or more of the echo kind of thing? and finally, is there a way to add slapback tape delay on a signal already recorded or can it only be added during the initial recording?
can anyone shed some light on these?

 

[jpmorris]

The easiest way I've found with flanging is to use a machine with a varispeed control. I could never get the 'two copies' method to work because it was so difficult to synchonize them, but there is another way.

You will need two 3-head machines, plus whatever machine you're going to record it to. Set up your two machines so that they are in record mode, and monitor off the playback head. Run them both at the same speed, and if they're different types, you'll probably need to tweak the varispeed a little so the delay time is exactly the same on both decks.
Using a splitter, feed both machines with exactly the same input, and put both sets of outputs into a mixing desk. Having phase reversal on one of them might help, but I don't usually do that myself.
If you've got them mixed at roughly identical levels, you should find that by adjusting the varispeed control on one of the decks you can change the phase relationship and get some good flanging out of it. The only problem if you're doing this on a prerecorded track (aside from it requiring 4 decks!) is that it introduces a delay between the heads. If you're phasing the entire song, that's fine. If it's a single track, e.g drums, it can get awkward. Playing live or using a sequencer you can probably compensate for this, otherwise you'll have to fly it in tape-to-tape and try to get the timing right.

I use a TASCAM 32 and a Revox B77 for this, but it's a pain - I'm tempted to try and get two 3-head cassette decks since I could just stick them in a corner permanently wired up for that purpose.

Sound-on-sound has several meanings, without context it's hard to know what it means. If it was a professional studio it might simply mean overdubbing. Usually it refers to home recording before multitracks were available - a lot of higher-end consumer decks had a way to record something while mixing in a new signal. Sometimes it was by disabling the erase head (Vortexion?), but usually it meant copying from the left track to the right track while mixing in the new input, and then repeating the process but copying right-to-left. It was noisy and going back and fixing something later was impossible.

If your deck supports sound-on-sound in the Revox manner (bouncing left-to-right etc), it can sometimes be used to add slapback to an existing track relatively easily. But it's usually best, when working with a proper multitrack setup, to copy the track from one track to another through a tape delay, much as you'd do with reverse reverb.

Hope that helps...

 

[damiza20]

thanks a lot for the help jpmorris. unfortunately i don't have 2 machines so do you know how the copy method works? i usually bounce tracks from the tape(i have an otari mx 5050) to my laptop so is there a way that i could get it with that? i'm thinking that would be the best way to add slapback to individual tracks i.e. bounce just the drums to my laptop and record that track back to tape to add the delay. is there another way you can think of for that? what about phasing, is that a multiple machine effect as well? thanks again

 

[jpmorris]

thanks a lot for the help jpmorris. unfortunately i don't have 2 machines so do you know how the copy method works? i usually bounce tracks from the tape(i have an otari mx 5050) to my laptop so is there a way that i could get it with that? i'm thinking that would be the best way to add slapback to individual tracks i.e. bounce just the drums to my laptop and record that track back to tape to add the delay. is there another way you can think of for that? what about phasing, is that a multiple machine effect as well? thanks again

For slapback with a laptop and a single machine, you could play the track off the laptop, and record it onto another track through the otari. Assuming the deck has been set up to monitor off the playback head, you'll get a delay around 1/15 sec, so if you get the DAW to play the delayed track at a slightly lower volume or something you'll have a slapback effect.

Phasing with just a single deck and a laptop is going to be tricky, but in theory this should work.
What you'll have to do is take the track which you want to add phasing to, duplicate it in the DAW, and slide the copy forward about 1/15th of a second so that it's delayed by that much. If you're doing this in stereo, you'll also need 4 outputs (you could do it using a normal stereo pair if the track is mono, substitute 'L' for '1 and 2' and 'R' for '3 and 4' in that case).
Make the DAW output the delayed copy of the track to channels 3 and 4 of your digital output, and feed those into a mixing desk. Make the DAW also output the original, un-delayed copy to channels 1 and 2 of the output, and feed that into the Otari. Ensure that no other tracks are output on either pair of channels or it won't work!

Now, put the otari into record and make it monitor off the playback head. Send the output from the Otari into the mixing desk as well and adjust the levels and the amount of delay time (either the varispeed or by changing the offset of the copy in the DAW) until they start to cancel each other out, and then you should be able to get phasing effects by adjusting the varispeed control on the Otari.
You should also be able to record the output from the mixing desk back into the DAW, though you'll need to slide it back into sync with the rest of the project because it will be 1/15th of a second out or thereabouts.