Let it bleed
Bleed-over is when the signal on one tape track "bleeds over" to adjacent tracks. For example, if you hit track 2 too hard and really saturate the tape, you can hear some of track 2 on tracks one and three, the magnetic signal "bleeds over."
If someone stripes a tape on the edge tracks (typical), it's for two reasons:
1.) because the tracks on the edge of the tape can become damaged the easiest, you typically would want to use the edge tracks for information that is the least delicate. This is why on non-striped tapes you'll often find the bass and kick tracks relegated to the outer tracks on the tape, because the lower frequency signals are more robust/resistant to oxide layer loss, edge fraying, etc.
2.) You can hit the edge tracks hard (high magnetic saturation levels) with the striped timecode to make it that much more robust against damage. Plus timecode signals aren't as delicate as, say, the high frequency response required to get the "air" on a vocal track, so they can survive on the edges better than the recordings themselves. Then you put the music tracks in the middle of the tape; this not only keeps the music away from the edges, but keeps it away from portential magnetic bleedover from the outer stripe tracks.
G.
Recording engineers stripe tapes.............why
