weird recording idea

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surfmaster

surfmaster

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that probably will sound miserable, but im gonna try it sometime.

so im a kid with cheap gear and my interface has two inputs so ive been just tracking drums in stereo lately.

i want to try something that may seem kinda crazy, i just wanna know what you guys think, or if some of you have tried it, how it sounds.

so my idea was to send the bass/snare on two seperate tracks into my computer while recording the overheads and toms on like a four track tape recorder or something (maybe an 8 track if i can get my hands on one) and then record those back into the computer and line them up with the computer tracks so i can have more tracks to mix. i wanted to try and get a half analog and half digital sound. what do you guys think?

problem is i dont have an analog recorder yet...
 
Hey surfmaster - the problem you will encounter with this is that the tape 4-track will usually not play back at exactly the same speed as you recorded it, so you will get (at best) phasing and (at worst) drifting tracks off by a few seconds by the end of the song... you can somewhat correct with timestretching, but if there's any track bleed, you'll still most likely have some phasing issues... maybe that'll be a cool sound you can work with as an experiment, but just wanted to give you the heads up :)
 
Biscuit is right, if the machine is analog you could have trouble keeping parts aligned for very long. It won't hurt anyting to try it, but don't be suprised if you are disappointed.

If you have a 4-track, you could always record stereo overheads, kick and snare to the 4-track simultaneously and then dump those into the computer 2 at a time, as they will align Ok with each other. If you do the overheads right, the toms should come through just fine.

G.
 
yeah i usually just end up micing with 4 mics anyways (kick snare overheads) oh well, i may as well just give both ideas a try sometime and borrow a friend's four track. thanks!
 
Ya give it a go and see... you might get some fun lo-fi sounds out of the cassette... if you're going for quality, however... you'll probably be happier if you just pre-mix your 4 drum mic's (via a mixer or even the 4-track if it has 4 in's) and record a stereo track straight to the computer (which it sounds like you're already doing?) - you still won't get the full separation of the 4 mic's obviously, but the kind of "analog" you'll get from a Tascam Portastudio and the kind of "analog" you hear on professional studio albums is very different!
But as I say, give it a try and experiment - you might come up with some cool sounds combining lo-fi and hi(ish)-fi :)
 
yeah by no means was i going for a real nice old 2" tape studio analog sound, just something to change the sound of my recordings and make it a little easier to mix. and yeah ive been doing the four input to a mixer then down to stereo maybe it would be better to send the snare and kick to the 4 track... ill figure it out. i dont think i dare send all my mics to a tape recorder, that just wouldent sound good at all. maybe i could try recording all the tracks into both and then add in some of the tape signal for the bass drum and snare or overheads, whichever sounds cool. thanks though!

-matt
 
are there any plugins that will make an analog sound? I know that iZotope has a free plugin that makes vinyl sounds.
 
I've tried this before and it didn't work too well. Basically I recorded four drum tracks and tried to dump them into the computer two at a time. The tape recorder didn't play back at exactly the same speed each time and over the course of the song, the two pairs of tracks were off by as much an eighth note.

But then again it was a relatively cheap 4-track cassette recorder that was about eight years old (or more) at the time.
 
i dont mind the signal not being analog anymore. im sure once its been recorded onto tape, you'll hear analog degredation and thats what im looking for anyways. what if i recorded bass/snare into the tape machine, panned hard left and hard right, and then played that back into the computer recording hard left and hard right? im guessing the whole song wont line up correctly? im hoping that two tracks would play on time with eachother. that would be ridiculous if tapes were so bad they couldent even play something in stereo on time with itself.
 
If you can swing it you might want to try to rent something like an Empirical Labs http://empiricallabs.com "FATSO Jr."

For what it's worth, I've found that if I add some "warmth" with the "tranny" button engaged it can do some absolutely lovely things to the overheads.

The "compression" stuff has gotten me into more trouble than I would have liked when I have used the unit on the recording of overheads... but the "warmth" and "tranny" thing have been damn near priceless.

My friend Andy Hong has like 3 or 4 in his rig [his is not an exceptionally over the top studio... wish I could find a picture but I can't]... he says he uses them on damn near everything. His stuff sounds pretty excellent so who am I to argue. I have found no other box that claims to "emulate analog" that is even close to being worth a damn and I've tried damn near all of them.

The only one that really comes close is the Crane Song LTD. HEDD-192... which is a damn fine converter as well as analog emulation processor... but that does the 'analog emulation' in the digital domain [which I suppose could be helpful for processing "after the fact"... and net you a great converter].

As I mentioned earlier... I have found the FATSO Jr. to be very helpful with things like overheads... and the best part is you don't have to go through the agita of aligning an analog deck [physical tape path alignments; electronic alignments; head alignments; etc.], striping SMPTE time code... locking your computer to chase that time code...

Best of luck with it.
 
Well why don't you rent the 8 track you were thinking off. Record everything onto that, and transfer everything to your computer at the sametime.

Saves trying to match up recordings on two different sources.
 
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