true "sound on sound"

[nate_dennis]

I was reading a preview of "guirilla home recording" and he metioned and Idea that I thought I'd see if any of you have tried. He said that he put a piece of tape over the erase head so that he could record right over a previous track without erasing the old data. A true sound on sound recording.

Have any of you given this a try? Do you like it? I just thought I'd see what you all think.

 

[sweetbeats]

The original track is still gonna get messed up though...it'll be there kind of in remnant form but the new track is going to realign those oxide particles. The erase head gives the new track more of a clean slate...taking that function out of the loop is going to leave a muckied original track and not as good a quality overdub, but it certainly is an interesting idea...try it!

 

[nate_dennis]

yeah it's an interesting thought, I'm having fun researching methods!!!

 

[Herm]

The first recorder other than a portable cassette unit, And first band I ever recorded was done a real sound on sound machine back in the late 70,s.
What a job that was but at the time it was a hoot.
I wish I had kept a copy of that recording
But there are alot of those recordings from the past I should have kept and didnt.

 

[Richard King]

Sound on sound also referred to bouncing tracks within the same machine. I did this a bit on an early Teac machine that I owned. I actually did seven generations before it got unbearably noisy. This was a quarter track machine that had mic line mixing capabilities. I would record on the first track and take the output of that track and feed to the input on the other track. I would then plug a microphone into the mic input on the same track and record the mic and line inputs together, resulting in "sound on sound". I then fed the output of this newly recorded track back to the first track and add another mic signal to it, resulting in three signals on one track. If you messed up the balance you go back a step and try again. The Teac A-3300SX that sits beside me on my desk has this capability also, but I have never tried it on that machine. Then again, nearly all machines had this capability after a certain time period.

 

[Muckelroy]

Above describes some cool, elaborate track bouncing/mixing techniques.

But I think that what this post was originally describing was SOS in the form of disabling or bypassing the erase head on the machine track itself, to write additional signal on top of an existing track. Some of the older consumer machines out there have such a feature. But in the event that they don't have that feature, you can do as the original poster here did, and obstruct the erase head with scotch tape of some sort. Very clever -- I've never considered doing that!

 

[Richard King]

Normal Scotch tape won't block the erase head. You need to magnetically shield the erase head to do as described. The erase head signal would simply pass through normal Scotch tape. I THINK my very first RTR machine, a consumer Ampex deck had a sound on sound feature that defeated the erase head on a single channel basis. The machine really didn't compare to the Teac that I replaced it with though.