Bradshaw Leigh demonstrates editing analog tape. Full Analog tape and alignment course at udemy. Music "All I've Ever Known" By Justina Soto My Patreon Account / biasedaudio www.udemy.com/...
I did plenty of this when I worked in radio 45 years ago. The machines were 1/4” Ampex half-track stereo. Fortunately, I wasn’t editing music, mostly news sound bites. I remember editing down a nearly 20 minute interview with a guy who couldn’t say three words in a row without a long “uhhh” in the middle. It took a while to make him sound intelligent.
Same. 30 years in radio 1979-2009. On the way out cart machines and Otari reel to reel decks were long gone and PC automation systems like Audiovault for on-air DJ work and Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) for production. Now any kid at home with a laptop can do what we did with 50k dollars worth of broadcast equipment.
@@MattS-On-Air I was editing on tape 93-95 but it was a bless Win95 and first edition of Cool95 and then Cool96 and later multitrack Cool Edit Pro (with first real soundblaster Creative AWE32). Now looks nice but on radio under constant pressure of time, tape editing was a pain in the ass. Hard work half hour was done in 5 min on PC. Nice days...
Fortunately things are A LOT simpler nowadays. Even though I never worked on this I gotta say, it's an awesome thing to see that people still do this. I wouldn't mind learning and making a few tracks like this
@@CFox.7 It's just very cool to those electronically inclined. It pays homage to decades of recording. Also, it's widely known that reel to reel provides a particularly beautiful warmth in the tape sound. They have modern plug in's that emulate that warmth for digital recording. There's a lot of debate to whether those emulations properly replicate that authentic reel to reel sound.
@@Alex-Defatte I use those tape emulation plugins and I bet my left nut that NO ONE could consistently and reliably tell which was which in a blind AB comparison I do get the whole retro gear collectors paying homage thing. There's all kinds of retro collectors out there.
I have been doing this since 1955. I also did it with 2" video tape as well.... And you cut music audio tape at 45° so the edit is no so noticeable its like a cross fade from one tobthe other. With diaglog audio you make a 90° cut as you want the transition to be instantaneous.
@@londislagerhound no one cut tape in the 80s as electronic editing was in full swing. Cutting tape was in the 60s, way before time code was invented. the art of cutting tape was lost in the 70s and was impossible in the 80s because of the idiocy of helical scan
I used to splice tape left and right, along with a whole bunch of other little tricks that you young 'un's' never heard of, and some analog vet's never thought of...you have no idea how easy you've got it, especially if you produce commercials!!
Thanks for this video! People know the music of The Beatles and Pink Floyd but they don’t realize how their effects and sound quality were achieved over 50 years ago without auto tune and all the crazy electronic pedals musicians have today. The musicians were very talented but they don’t realize the sound engineers back then we’re working with tube amplifiers, 8 channel mixers were SOTA, the tape machines had wow & flutter issues, azimuth alignment issues, so even when you made perfect edits the recording level from one take to another might not match. People think Thomas Edison deserves the credit for recording sound, but Les Paul invented 90% of what’s used in a modern day studio!
@@error-xo7hr it's not just about having channels, it was using tube amplifiers, tape masters that had wow & flutter, microphones that either picked up all sounds and you had to make your studio an anechoic chamber, or microphones that you had to be directly in front of, and then dealing with the S/N ratio of analog. There was a lot that went into recording albums back then because people a lot of money on Hi-Fi's to reproduce the recordings as faithfully as possible and it was impressive to get the sound quality bands like Pink Floyd and The Beatles produced. You had to be there to understand and appreciate it.
@@rwfrench66GenX yes I'm a musician and even if I'm young I can understand the difficulty and the art of producing music in the 60s-70s-80s, the analog world has always fascinated me
@@error-xo7hr I meant no offense. It's cool that you're a musician and desire to learn about your passion. The Smithsonian Channel had like a 12 part series about recorded music that was amazing! It started going back to the creation of microphones and being able to electrify instruments. Then it went into creating records and jukeboxes and how songs had to be formatted to fit the length of the record to play in the jukebox. Then radio stations wanted more content so record companies started cutting songs down to 3 minutes on the 45 but longer on the LP's to appease the artist and appeal to consumers. Then Les Paul comes along and revolutionizes the recording studio and opens up all kinds of opportunities for bands to explore their creative boundaries. The thing is, I'm 56 and I work with a lot of young people and sometimes I get questions about how real "That 70's Show" was and honestly, it was like a documentary to me. I mean, yes, there was a bicentennial in 1976, but it really started around 1973. Cars, motorcycles and bicycles started coming out with red, white and blue paint schemes on certain models. Everyone had flags on their houses, in their cars, they had flag shirts, oh, and the parties, everyone was hungover until 1978 when they interrupted Happy Days to tell us Elvis was dead! That stuff doesn't go into a history book. Your generation has it's own stuff my generation wouldn't understand. Just because we were here doesn't mean we were part of everything going on. I watch this channel Brewstewfilms and this guy is from Michigan where I grew up but he grew up in the 90's. Some of the stuff in his videos I relate to, like going to his friend's and going on the trampoline and then adding a cinderblock and getting points for how hard you get hit, but when he makes Pokemon references I have no clue what he's talking about! I know there are trading cards and it probably had a cartoon or comic book or something, but I have no ideas who the characters are, but I understand the rest of the video and laugh my ass off!
I'm reminded of very early video tape editing where they would sprinkle fine iron filing on the tape to 'see' where the video sync pulses were so when the tape was edited back together the sync would remain constant. That's well before my time, but I did learn 1/4 inch audio and 1 inch video editing when I started out.
Yeah a few wipes across a bulk eraser would take care of that but by the time a blade got dull and had to be thrown out it would not have picked up enough magnetism from being in contact with tape to cause any issues.
Radio stations I worked at usually kept a fresh box of blades from the local hardware store handy along with yellow or white china markers. (the crayon like pencil things that had a little string to pull and peel off the surrounding material to expose more surface as it wore down from use.) He calls it a grease pencil.
amazing and humbling to watch however i'm so relieved technology caught up quick from the 30's. I'd still be editing some of my tracks to this day using this method :D
years ago, I used to do stuff like this. but it was just for myself on a Akai quad reel to reel. but my edits were not always as smooth as yours. it was mostly music I would record from my stereo, and edit out commercials, and songs I was not fond of, then when I was satisfied , I would transfer the master onto cassette. for my boombox . nothing pro or that applaudable. . . .
I didn't know they literally spliced the tape. Back then in mid-1980s when I was transferring my vinyl to compact cassette to play in a boombox sometimes I edit them or remixed them by pressing the "Pause" from a recorder then un-pause at the right time. It requires timing and it's not as difficult because our cassette recorder was a piano key type which pause and un-pause was instantaneous. It's hard to do that trick on a soft touch because of delay that when I played back the result the timing of beat was often off.
Did both, tape splicing and the pause trick to make extended versions of songs with the instrumentals that were usually on the b sides. Tape splicing had a higher success rate because the edit was always spot on, and the pause trick was very hit and miss because you had to have impeccable timing, and even if you did, sometimes the first half second after the edit didn't sound good (dull) because of the pinch roller crashing into the capstan had displaced the tape somewhat and the tape had to get back into alignment again. And you could only check this after you had recorded the entire rest of the song 😆 This is why I made most edits slightly before the beat (between 4 and 1) instead of right on it, because then the alignment would be solved by the time the beat came along.
I would love to see more analog editing in main stream music although we all know main stream music doesn’t really appreciate artistry or craft just merely cranking out bland song after bland song
The difference is that when tape was the main medium, artists were much more focused on capturing the right performance in the moment and sticking by it. The idea was not to have to do an entire album like this. It's easy to get lost in the convenience of digital editing and ending up spending way too much time on it. I'm guilty of it myself.
These studer machines are good, but you have to maintain them very wel, don't let the unit sit unused for a while, the capacitors go bad , it will refuse working, i had 2 of these.
You can't get clicks by editing tape. They are just magnetic fields that are whizzing by the head. The slow response of the head to fast alternating fields prevents a sudden jump from one level to another. I have edited tapes for about a decade and never experienced clicks, however horrible the actual cut was, until I started editing digital.
When possibilities are limited, and skills HAVE to be involved, the best things will arise. When possibilities and resources are limitless, everyone can play around, but the results will be crap. That´s why music was so good in the old days and why most music today is trivial shit.
I wish it was possible to buy these old Studer machines without paying used-car prices. I understand that they are incredibly complex and rare but I would imagine they are also almost completely unused these days except for the few of us that want them. it's too bad
@@bob4analog TF are you going on about trick?? ..you clearly don't belong to this discipline coz if you do you'd understand why I caught Zolanis1's sense of humor.. 2nd I don't mop around stacking online videos, I got more money than your entire muppet village will ever dream of in one life time!
Haha - you’ve reminded me, sometimes there was a picky producer who insisted that they could hear the edit, so one trick was to stick another piece of sticky tape before the one that had the edit, and they would see the first piece coming through and would be satisfied that they couldn’t hear an edit. Because actually wasn’t anything to hear! Or if they did say they could hear it, you knew they were bluffing! And because when you’re editing fast, against a deadline, you can’t afford to be wrong and got really good at it - it’s an astonishing skill to build up, which we’ve sort of lost in the age of being able to infinitely undo/save versions of things.
As these edits are all hard edits, you really had to choose where to edit. Which usually wasn't at exactly the first beat but sometimes on the 3rd beat just before the actual edit. That skill of listening to the best edit points helped me tons in computer editing later
Back in 1989 i was working in a radio station. We had REVOX MK2 for editing the news. It was a fun and delicate process... I still have one REVOX in my home studio.
keep in mind, once this method was used by underground djs in the 70s/80s (like ron hardy from chicago or larry levan from new york) to edit (rearranging) whole disco tracks for extended playtime. just image the massive effort those folks had to put into this. this is how so called disco, dub, 12" or extended versions were born, especially in the dance music industry.
Kinda reminds me of the early days of hip hop beat making before it became affordable for the home. Using tape decks to create "pause" tapes. Making a 4 second loop into a 2 minute beat. Wild.
Try doing all this under the pressure of a time deadline for a radio commercial to go on the air. Multiple splices, editing different voiceover reads together, strands of audio tape strung around your neck or taped hanging to the edge of the machine and/or desk top...all while the clock is ticking to get the spot produced for the clients approval! Invariably the razor blade would slice your thumb as well as the tape. Bandaid dispensers should have come mandatory when purchasing splicing blocks...
On the debate of Digital vs. Analog recording mediums , I recommend both. Especially if you're a music producer and want the options for either clean or dirty depending on what's needed per track. Digital is wonderful for exact copying, bouncing and bulk utility work whilst being quick to use where Tape has degradation with extended use/lengthy archiving while having the high learning curve needed to edit and splice. Analog on the other hand is grand when it comes to controlled chaos; that is the "color" and "dirt" of the sound when the imperfection of tape or synths lends to the style/feel of the work whereas Digital can only try to emulate that or sound "tinny" and "sterile". I say find the equipment from either side that sounds good to you and roll with it. Remember, we live in an era of too much variety, so find some equipment and make some badass music.
it depends, because you can reproduce some analogue systems digitally just fine. others are very difficult to emulate properly without a relatively large neural network. tape = easy. guitar amplifier & cabinet = very hard. warmth or other effects can be reproduced just by knowing what they are. for example, producing even order subharmonics. the trouble is knowing the original dimensionality of what made the sound. for example you can EQ boost lows, but that won't sound the same as a microphone's proximity effect because the proximity effect is a 3D phenomena projected onto a 2d membrane. the collapsed result's output is yes frequency changes, but the choice in what got those changes is unavailable to you once you're already collapsed into 2d audio timeline. its like trying to change a person's weight by changing their shadow. yes, you can increase their stomach outline but plenty of things could also reproduce that shape. analogue EQ sucks for doing that as much as a digital one does. the point is that the 'amazing analog' stuff will typically just be complicated and hard to model. or it will be acoustic. something where you don't know the original dimensionality. there's nothing 'warm' about analogue anything. thats not the choices we have to choose between.
Don't know if you could do this on a Studer but on the Ampex 102 you could flick the take up tension arm and the section you wanted to remove would just spool off into your hand. Looked very cool and always impressed producers :) That was 30 years ago and I've more than forgotten the knack now! Also the most extreme thing we did back then was editing 2" tape and running it off the machine around a mic stand to get a drum loop.
I record basic tracks like drums, bass, & guitars to 2 inch analog tape then dump to protools and do all overdubs and editing in the digital domain. That's the best of both worlds especially with my Burl converters. No problems here I love analog and digital!
I would love to learn this stuff. It's obviously very time-consuming, but I'm sure it's very satisfying when it's done right. And frustrating af if you make a mistake. Very cool video.
this is way beyond my time as an 18 year old but man pre-2000's everything was so human. it was this amalgamation of probably hundreds of years TOTALLED UP of love, care, and passion for the musical art form. nothing was quite done for you. art was a trust fall, even TRYING to calculate it was completely out of the question. there was nuance, texture, imperfections. you get that now but only from people who want it on purpose. humanity in music is rare, this video was super interesting to me even as someone that has no idea what the hell is going on. i loved it.
As a performing musician for 55 years, an audiophile for 55 years, a recording engineer for 35 years I have been through recording history from tape to digital. I still don't understand the obsession for analog today. I bought my first CD player in 1986, played my first CD and then never listened to vinyl again. I was shocked at this CD audio quality, just as shocked as I was when I bought my first audiophile stereo at 14 years old in 1973. The CD had: 1) No noise floor. 2) 2x the dynamic range (because of the low noise floor). 3) The first play was as good as the 1000th play. No wear of media. 4) No record pops. 5) No needle in groove rumble. 6) Longer uninterrupted play. 7) Shuffle so the album was new each play. 8) No tape hiss. 9) No degradation of signal from bouncing. 10) More detail in higher frequencies. Analog distorts waveforms above 10kHz. 11) Later higher resolutions and bit depth increased dynamic range and accuracy even more. 12) No degradation of signal in copying. 13) Media could be protected with WAV back-ups. 14) ....and so much more! Maybe the lack of DAC understanding is preventing people from actually hearing how good digital can sound? Maybe non-engineers never heard the degrading quality from 24/96 to 16/44 to MP3 of their precious mix? Maybe it is just a bunch of people without trained ears repeating what some expert said? I don't understand, I would never go back to tape recording today, and I don't use a computer for tracking or editing. I record the same way we did in tape days, no computer, just a hardware 24Track SD recorder sitting all alone, I never "see" music, the entire recording process is from fantastic artist performances, and we use only our ears/brain to know when it is correct. Timing errors, vocals slightly out of perfect pitch, harmonies out of pitch, second choruses are performed not copied and are different from the first, slightly out of tune instruments. All that would happen on a stage is in the recording, humanity is preserved.
Although I was never involved with music, my dad was and I used to go into the studio where ALL the musicians & performers were present. Mixing was done in real time and placed on taps. They would record a sing over and over with an audio slate and pick the right recording for mastering to vinyl. The recording was organic and not sterile as everyone could see each other and motion with hand or eye gestures. I was in magnetic video recording since its invention in 1955. Audio was easy to understand how it was recorded. You only had a 30khz bandwidth to deal with. Video on the other hand had almost 5MHZ of band width to place on magnetic tape. I dont think most people on here would understand how challenging that was!
You obviously make a lot of sense, I'm 53 and have been playing music and playing with all kinds or recording systems since I was 8, and even though your arguments are logical an on point, digital always sounds too bright for me, even since the first CDs I heard. DDA vinyls didn't have that. Currently I prefer hybrid systems, both for recording as for guitars, synths, drums, bass, etc. Pushing to the red in analog has no equal in digital. I go for the best of both worlds and tracking as you say definitely makes a ton of difference. Cheers
My last razor blade cut was in 2004. There was nothing so satisfying when the edit was perfect. I miss it at times. I don't miss when you just cut the top of a vocal sibilance and have to literally crawl around on the floor to find the millimeter sliver back onto the edit.
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I did plenty of this when I worked in radio 45 years ago. The machines were 1/4” Ampex half-track stereo. Fortunately, I wasn’t editing music, mostly news sound bites. I remember editing down a nearly 20 minute interview with a guy who couldn’t say three words in a row without a long “uhhh” in the middle. It took a while to make him sound intelligent.
Make hime sound intelligent. Hehe
xD
Same. 30 years in radio 1979-2009. On the way out cart machines and Otari reel to reel decks were long gone and PC automation systems like Audiovault for on-air DJ work and Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) for production. Now any kid at home with a laptop can do what we did with 50k dollars worth of broadcast equipment.
@@MattS-On-Air I was editing on tape 93-95 but it was a bless Win95 and first edition of Cool95 and then Cool96 and later multitrack Cool Edit Pro (with first real soundblaster Creative AWE32). Now looks nice but on radio under constant pressure of time, tape editing was a pain in the ass. Hard work half hour was done in 5 min on PC. Nice days...
@@MattS-On-Air and ask "what's tape" 🤣
This isn't editing, this is art.
this definately is an art
Editing is an art
Love your vids
Nooooo shxt.
Art and patience.
This is an art that was lost in the late 90's. Some people still do keep it alive which is beyond cool. Thanks for the lesson!
Fortunately things are A LOT simpler nowadays. Even though I never worked on this I gotta say, it's an awesome thing to see that people still do this. I wouldn't mind learning and making a few tracks like this
I do this with VHS tape using scotch tape on the back of the tape if there's a damaged section
Who...in the modern age... would do this by choice ?
@@CFox.7 It's just very cool to those electronically inclined. It pays homage to decades of recording. Also, it's widely known that reel to reel provides a particularly beautiful warmth in the tape sound. They have modern plug in's that emulate that warmth for digital recording. There's a lot of debate to whether those emulations properly replicate that authentic reel to reel sound.
@@Alex-Defatte I use those tape emulation plugins and I bet my left nut that NO ONE could consistently and reliably tell which was which in a blind AB comparison
I do get the whole retro gear collectors paying homage thing. There's all kinds of retro collectors out there.
OH MY GOD the angle cut of the tape letting the transition fade in is literally what that effect on the computer is based off of, that blew my mind.
I have been doing this since 1955. I also did it with 2" video tape as well....
And you cut music audio tape at 45° so the edit is no so noticeable its like a cross fade from one tobthe other. With diaglog audio you make a 90° cut as you want the transition to be instantaneous.
Interesting!
I started in television in 1983, just late enough to avoid having to cut 2" videotape. Not something I regret :-)
@@londislagerhound no one cut tape in the 80s as electronic editing was in full swing. Cutting tape was in the 60s, way before time code was invented. the art of cutting tape was lost in the 70s and was impossible in the 80s because of the idiocy of helical scan
that's amazing
You edited the right reel of tape. I "dig" that song and love it very much.⭐
I used to splice tape left and right, along with a whole bunch of other little tricks that you young 'un's' never heard of, and some analog vet's never thought of...you have no idea how easy you've got it, especially if you produce commercials!!
Excellent video! I still record to tape myself. For me there's nothing like it...
Same here too
Me too!
Thanks for this video! People know the music of The Beatles and Pink Floyd but they don’t realize how their effects and sound quality were achieved over 50 years ago without auto tune and all the crazy electronic pedals musicians have today. The musicians were very talented but they don’t realize the sound engineers back then we’re working with tube amplifiers, 8 channel mixers were SOTA, the tape machines had wow & flutter issues, azimuth alignment issues, so even when you made perfect edits the recording level from one take to another might not match. People think Thomas Edison deserves the credit for recording sound, but Les Paul invented 90% of what’s used in a modern day studio!
Well there are 70s mixers that have 48 channels
@@error-xo7hr it's not just about having channels, it was using tube amplifiers, tape masters that had wow & flutter, microphones that either picked up all sounds and you had to make your studio an anechoic chamber, or microphones that you had to be directly in front of, and then dealing with the S/N ratio of analog. There was a lot that went into recording albums back then because people a lot of money on Hi-Fi's to reproduce the recordings as faithfully as possible and it was impressive to get the sound quality bands like Pink Floyd and The Beatles produced. You had to be there to understand and appreciate it.
@@rwfrench66GenX yes I'm a musician and even if I'm young I can understand the difficulty and the art of producing music in the 60s-70s-80s, the analog world has always fascinated me
@@error-xo7hr I meant no offense. It's cool that you're a musician and desire to learn about your passion. The Smithsonian Channel had like a 12 part series about recorded music that was amazing! It started going back to the creation of microphones and being able to electrify instruments. Then it went into creating records and jukeboxes and how songs had to be formatted to fit the length of the record to play in the jukebox. Then radio stations wanted more content so record companies started cutting songs down to 3 minutes on the 45 but longer on the LP's to appease the artist and appeal to consumers. Then Les Paul comes along and revolutionizes the recording studio and opens up all kinds of opportunities for bands to explore their creative boundaries. The thing is, I'm 56 and I work with a lot of young people and sometimes I get questions about how real "That 70's Show" was and honestly, it was like a documentary to me. I mean, yes, there was a bicentennial in 1976, but it really started around 1973. Cars, motorcycles and bicycles started coming out with red, white and blue paint schemes on certain models. Everyone had flags on their houses, in their cars, they had flag shirts, oh, and the parties, everyone was hungover until 1978 when they interrupted Happy Days to tell us Elvis was dead! That stuff doesn't go into a history book. Your generation has it's own stuff my generation wouldn't understand. Just because we were here doesn't mean we were part of everything going on. I watch this channel Brewstewfilms and this guy is from Michigan where I grew up but he grew up in the 90's. Some of the stuff in his videos I relate to, like going to his friend's and going on the trampoline and then adding a cinderblock and getting points for how hard you get hit, but when he makes Pokemon references I have no clue what he's talking about! I know there are trading cards and it probably had a cartoon or comic book or something, but I have no ideas who the characters are, but I understand the rest of the video and laugh my ass off!
@@rwfrench66GenX no, you did not offend me, indeed thanks for all this information :D. How I wish I was born a few decades earlier ...
This is a real skills set. The sound of analog is just so special to me to this day.
It's much more dynamic than digital
@@Norrbottning Errr... not really. Unless you love hiss.
Oh man, I spent many a day editing tape all day long. Digital editing is a snap.
I once did this to Tom Sawyer by Rush, it was nearly 15 minutes long! So much fun.
Nice, that was a perfect, seamless edit!
This is awesome.
I love the sound when the tape is scrubbed back and forth
Scrubbing was always my favorite part. Just don't hit rewind or FF with the tape lifters down. It gets loud.
Like scratching with a vinyl. :)
This is great! I took a class for this in 1996. Now I use software. I never made it a career, but I am currently running 2 YT channels. ☕️👍🏻
I'm reminded of very early video tape editing where they would sprinkle fine iron filing on the tape to 'see' where the video sync pulses were so when the tape was edited back together the sync would remain constant. That's well before my time, but I did learn 1/4 inch audio and 1 inch video editing when I started out.
They still sell that material, some people use it to check for tape head alignment.
Even the audio from the video is great!
Brings back memories!
Make sure that your blade is not magnetized.
Yeah a few wipes across a bulk eraser would take care of that but by the time a blade got dull and had to be thrown out it would not have picked up enough magnetism from being in contact with tape to cause any issues.
Radio stations I worked at usually kept a fresh box of blades from the local hardware store handy along with yellow or white china markers. (the crayon like pencil things that had a little string to pull and peel off the surrounding material to expose more surface as it wore down from use.) He calls it a grease pencil.
I made that for years and as I was showing this video to my 15 years old daughter she said : there was no Ctrl Z ! ;-)
Masterfully done. Wow!
Ce qui mettait un temps pareil en collage à l'époque, met maintenant 2 secondes avec le logiciel audiocleanic !
Thanks for sharing this demo. Quite the skilled craft!
I then run screaming from the room and that evil machine. Greetings from New Mexico.
Wow, that was real hard work, we are very luck now !
Yes, hard work. But i'm very interesting to watch these machine 😉
I used to be able to splice broken cassette tapes, but THIS LOOKS INSANELY HARD!!
Sometimes the simplest things seem the most magical. Very cool!
A lost art, thanks for introducing this to younger generations (me included)!
Wow, what an eye-opener. Great video.
This is a hell of a job!!! 🙂
amazing and humbling to watch however i'm so relieved technology caught up quick from the 30's. I'd still be editing some of my tracks to this day using this method :D
this is what we used from the 70's into the early 2000's... lol not the 30's
30s? This was used up until the early 2000s if i'm not mistaken
Golden years.
This is wild. Ableton ain't got nuthin' on this.
im so glad I live in the digital age :D
Oh wow nice cut on analog editing system
What are those grey units in the back on the right?
Pro Tools HD audio interfaces.
So cool! Thanks for sharing
I learned how to do this in 1997. I loved editing video and audio but never took it on a s a job.
Much easier these days :)
Gives 80 levels of undo a whole new meaning good grief….
amazing work
years ago, I used to do stuff like this. but it was just for myself on a Akai quad reel to reel.
but my edits were not always as smooth as yours. it was mostly music I would record from my stereo, and edit out commercials, and songs I was not fond of, then when I was satisfied , I would transfer the master onto cassette. for my boombox . nothing pro or that applaudable. . . .
i don't miss it for i minute i can remember doing that many times at 2 in the morning.
lol I learned analog but never had to edit. so glad LOL
I didn't know they literally spliced the tape. Back then in mid-1980s when I was transferring my vinyl to compact cassette to play in a boombox sometimes I edit them or remixed them by pressing the "Pause" from a recorder then un-pause at the right time. It requires timing and it's not as difficult because our cassette recorder was a piano key type which pause and un-pause was instantaneous. It's hard to do that trick on a soft touch because of delay that when I played back the result the timing of beat was often off.
Did both, tape splicing and the pause trick to make extended versions of songs with the instrumentals that were usually on the b sides. Tape splicing had a higher success rate because the edit was always spot on, and the pause trick was very hit and miss because you had to have impeccable timing, and even if you did, sometimes the first half second after the edit didn't sound good (dull) because of the pinch roller crashing into the capstan had displaced the tape somewhat and the tape had to get back into alignment again. And you could only check this after you had recorded the entire rest of the song 😆
This is why I made most edits slightly before the beat (between 4 and 1) instead of right on it, because then the alignment would be solved by the time the beat came along.
Серьёзный аппарат.Не понятно канешна что мужик говорит Но,аппарат класс.
I would love to see more analog editing in main stream music although we all know main stream music doesn’t really appreciate artistry or craft just merely cranking out bland song after bland song
I want to record a full EP on Analog!!
Been a few years since I’ve done that
So interesting!
music art at its best
I'm sure this engineer has his barbers license
Naw these days I just use a flowbee.
Keep calm and edit tape!
me deu ansiedade so de assistir
Thank God for digital. I've literally edited sound in mere seconds. It took this man 5 minutes, imagine doing an entire album.
The difference is that when tape was the main medium, artists were much more focused on capturing the right performance in the moment and sticking by it. The idea was not to have to do an entire album like this. It's easy to get lost in the convenience of digital editing and ending up spending way too much time on it. I'm guilty of it myself.
You cannot make mistake, ever.
You can but it's messy :)
damn that was clean
I've got a pice of Amnesiac / Kid A session tape which came with the book edition of Moon Shaped Pool. Really nice, have no way to read / play it.
very good
seems fun
Very amazing.
These studer machines are good, but you have to maintain them very wel, don't let the unit sit unused for a while, the capacitors go bad , it will refuse working, i had 2 of these.
I'm commenting what everyone is thinking: Holy freaking crap!
Does the angled cut act as a sort of physical crossfade?
What an amazing art!!!
Very nice deck. Well made video.
Nice to watch...economy of movement...very focused. But who is Cap Stan ?
Beautiful. And how does it sound so smooth with no clicks?
The use of the sloped cut eliminates clicks, actually it's a very quick dissolve. If you do a straight cut during a musical note you can get a click.
You can't get clicks by editing tape. They are just magnetic fields that are whizzing by the head. The slow response of the head to fast alternating fields prevents a sudden jump from one level to another. I have edited tapes for about a decade and never experienced clicks, however horrible the actual cut was, until I started editing digital.
Cut with scissors.
Join with toothpaste.
😂
When possibilities are limited, and skills HAVE to be involved, the best things will arise.
When possibilities and resources are limitless, everyone can play around, but the results will be crap.
That´s why music was so good in the old days and why most music today is trivial shit.
nice
I wish it was possible to buy these old Studer machines without paying used-car prices. I understand that they are incredibly complex and rare but I would imagine they are also almost completely unused these days except for the few of us that want them. it's too bad
Tell someone to this dude that today you can do it in three seconds in almost any editor, maybe his life will become a little better.
I'll just stick to recording on tape and cutting it together in Ableton ;)
21 year old engineer here to say I'll never complain about comping a vocal in pro tools again
From a 66 year old tape editor....Word!
LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.. this just floored me!
Love tape editing!
@@dharkknight4747 - So says the guy who only has 1 vid and only 12 views ! X-D
@@bob4analog TF are you going on about trick?? ..you clearly don't belong to this discipline coz if you do you'd understand why I caught Zolanis1's sense of humor.. 2nd I don't mop around stacking online videos, I got more money than your entire muppet village will ever dream of in one life time!
Makes you realize how easy we have it with modern daws
all the buttons and plugins are no substitute for raw talent 🤣
@@Dr.W.Krueger not a substitute but a good compliment. Not sure what the need for a laughing emoji was
Jesus,... THANK GOD FOR Software, and 24bit Digital. I would NEVER have the patience for this. And,.. think about it. ONCE IT'S CUT - IT'S CUT!!! WOW!
Wow. This just expanded my patience with digital editing. That process has to make you feel good after completing a project and hearing the playback.
A real work
I remember those days. It's the only thing about analog I don't miss much, well, that and the cost of tape.
It's 3:16am and i should be sleeping but here i am. I don't even own any recording equipment.
But it's cool to learn new things though.
same here
@@KitsukiTheLostIsland 3:26 here (I do have a reel to reel though)
3:09 and yup! same here
same here man like this kinda old tape
3:30 here
Every time I rewatch this video, it still astounds me how perfect the transition is.
Haha - you’ve reminded me, sometimes there was a picky producer who insisted that they could hear the edit, so one trick was to stick another piece of sticky tape before the one that had the edit, and they would see the first piece coming through and would be satisfied that they couldn’t hear an edit. Because actually wasn’t anything to hear! Or if they did say they could hear it, you knew they were bluffing! And because when you’re editing fast, against a deadline, you can’t afford to be wrong and got really good at it - it’s an astonishing skill to build up, which we’ve sort of lost in the age of being able to infinitely undo/save versions of things.
As these edits are all hard edits, you really had to choose where to edit. Which usually wasn't at exactly the first beat but sometimes on the 3rd beat just before the actual edit. That skill of listening to the best edit points helped me tons in computer editing later
Jesus christ this looks like a pain in the ass. But what an art it is
Nevermind the haters, this is science right here!
MarkusAudio the haters couldn’t do it! I know I fuckin can’t!
For real.
@@gabet3754 For reel to reel
tape is where its at, I use to do this on a regular basis, miss those days, COMMITTING to takes
Back in 1989 i was working in a radio station. We had REVOX MK2 for editing the news. It was a fun and delicate process... I still have one REVOX in my home studio.
Nice machines.
keep in mind, once this method was used by underground djs in the 70s/80s (like ron hardy from chicago or larry levan from new york) to edit (rearranging) whole disco tracks for extended playtime. just image the massive effort those folks had to put into this. this is how so called disco, dub, 12" or extended versions were born, especially in the dance music industry.
Nice.
Kinda reminds me of the early days of hip hop beat making before it became affordable for the home. Using tape decks to create "pause" tapes. Making a 4 second loop into a 2 minute beat. Wild.
5 minutes for something that today is done in seconds. Amazing! I used to be a film projectionist so I know how that feels.
As soon as I saw that little piece of tape fly by after the edit and the track was still seamless, my jaw literally dropped. This is so cool!
sometimes even when editing on audacity i surprise myself when it becomes seamless
wow and I'm over here complaining about having to comp 50 takes on a vocal in ableton...
Try doing all this under the pressure of a time deadline for a radio commercial to go on the air. Multiple splices, editing different voiceover reads together, strands of audio tape strung around your neck or taped hanging to the edge of the machine and/or desk top...all while the clock is ticking to get the spot produced for the clients approval! Invariably the razor blade would slice your thumb as well as the tape. Bandaid dispensers should have come mandatory when purchasing splicing blocks...
On the debate of Digital vs. Analog recording mediums , I recommend both.
Especially if you're a music producer and want the options for either clean or dirty depending on what's needed per track.
Digital is wonderful for exact copying, bouncing and bulk utility work whilst being quick to use where Tape has degradation with extended use/lengthy archiving while having the high learning curve needed to edit and splice. Analog on the other hand is grand when it comes to controlled chaos; that is the "color" and "dirt" of the sound when the imperfection of tape or synths lends to the style/feel of the work whereas Digital can only try to emulate that or sound "tinny" and "sterile".
I say find the equipment from either side that sounds good to you and roll with it. Remember, we live in an era of too much variety, so find some equipment and make some badass music.
There are good plugins out there for that warm tape sound. I can't tell the difference but I grew up on cassettes.
If you can't make a sound feel colored, dirty & imperfect from inside of a computer, you simply aren't a skilled mix engineer.
That tape machine costs more than my car - not a realistic option for about 99% of people.
@@trevor_mounts_music Yes. The well-paid professionals who advocate for analogue tape don't seem to realise how expensive it was and is.
it depends, because you can reproduce some analogue systems digitally just fine. others are very difficult to emulate properly without a relatively large neural network.
tape = easy. guitar amplifier & cabinet = very hard.
warmth or other effects can be reproduced just by knowing what they are. for example, producing even order subharmonics.
the trouble is knowing the original dimensionality of what made the sound. for example you can EQ boost lows, but that won't sound the same as a microphone's proximity effect because the proximity effect is a 3D phenomena projected onto a 2d membrane. the collapsed result's output is yes frequency changes, but the choice in what got those changes is unavailable to you once you're already collapsed into 2d audio timeline.
its like trying to change a person's weight by changing their shadow. yes, you can increase their stomach outline but plenty of things could also reproduce that shape.
analogue EQ sucks for doing that as much as a digital one does.
the point is that the 'amazing analog' stuff will typically just be complicated and hard to model. or it will be acoustic. something where you don't know the original dimensionality.
there's nothing 'warm' about analogue anything. thats not the choices we have to choose between.
Don't know if you could do this on a Studer but on the Ampex 102 you could flick the take up tension arm and the section you wanted to remove would just spool off into your hand. Looked very cool and always impressed producers :) That was 30 years ago and I've more than forgotten the knack now! Also the most extreme thing we did back then was editing 2" tape and running it off the machine around a mic stand to get a drum loop.
Studer likes this.
I record basic tracks like drums, bass, & guitars to 2 inch analog tape then dump to protools and do all overdubs and editing in the digital domain. That's the best of both worlds especially with my Burl converters. No problems here I love analog and digital!
I would love to learn this stuff. It's obviously very time-consuming, but I'm sure it's very satisfying when it's done right. And frustrating af if you make a mistake.
Very cool video.
get an OP1
And gosh I want this tape machine....
this is way beyond my time as an 18 year old but man pre-2000's everything was so human. it was this amalgamation of probably hundreds of years TOTALLED UP of love, care, and passion for the musical art form. nothing was quite done for you. art was a trust fall, even TRYING to calculate it was completely out of the question. there was nuance, texture, imperfections. you get that now but only from people who want it on purpose. humanity in music is rare, this video was super interesting to me even as someone that has no idea what the hell is going on. i loved it.
As a performing musician for 55 years, an audiophile for 55 years, a recording engineer for 35 years I have been through recording history from tape to digital. I still don't understand the obsession for analog today. I bought my first CD player in 1986, played my first CD and then never listened to vinyl again. I was shocked at this CD audio quality, just as shocked as I was when I bought my first audiophile stereo at 14 years old in 1973. The CD had:
1) No noise floor.
2) 2x the dynamic range (because of the low noise floor).
3) The first play was as good as the 1000th play. No wear of media.
4) No record pops.
5) No needle in groove rumble.
6) Longer uninterrupted play.
7) Shuffle so the album was new each play.
8) No tape hiss.
9) No degradation of signal from bouncing.
10) More detail in higher frequencies. Analog distorts waveforms above 10kHz.
11) Later higher resolutions and bit depth increased dynamic range and accuracy even more.
12) No degradation of signal in copying.
13) Media could be protected with WAV back-ups.
14) ....and so much more!
Maybe the lack of DAC understanding is preventing people from actually hearing how good digital can sound? Maybe non-engineers never heard the degrading quality from 24/96 to 16/44 to MP3 of their precious mix? Maybe it is just a bunch of people without trained ears repeating what some expert said? I don't understand, I would never go back to tape recording today, and I don't use a computer for tracking or editing. I record the same way we did in tape days, no computer, just a hardware 24Track SD recorder sitting all alone, I never "see" music, the entire recording process is from fantastic artist performances, and we use only our ears/brain to know when it is correct. Timing errors, vocals slightly out of perfect pitch, harmonies out of pitch, second choruses are performed not copied and are different from the first, slightly out of tune instruments. All that would happen on a stage is in the recording, humanity is preserved.
I like the sound of tape degredation, pops, hiss. 😊
@@hanglider I like the sound of an artist musician as if they are sitting in front of me.
@@WildernessMusic_GentleSerene That’s reasonable
Although I was never involved with music, my dad was and I used to go into the studio where ALL the musicians & performers were present. Mixing was done in real time and placed on taps. They would record a sing over and over with an audio slate and pick the right recording for mastering to vinyl. The recording was organic and not sterile as everyone could see each other and motion with hand or eye gestures.
I was in magnetic video recording since its invention in 1955. Audio was easy to understand how it was recorded. You only had a 30khz bandwidth to deal with. Video on the other hand had almost 5MHZ of band width to place on magnetic tape. I dont think most people on here would understand how challenging that was!
You obviously make a lot of sense, I'm 53 and have been playing music and playing with all kinds or recording systems since I was 8, and even though your arguments are logical an on point, digital always sounds too bright for me, even since the first CDs I heard. DDA vinyls didn't have that.
Currently I prefer hybrid systems, both for recording as for guitars, synths, drums, bass, etc.
Pushing to the red in analog has no equal in digital.
I go for the best of both worlds and tracking as you say definitely makes a ton of difference.
Cheers
My last razor blade cut was in 2004. There was nothing so satisfying when the edit was perfect. I miss it at times. I don't miss when you just cut the top of a vocal sibilance and have to literally crawl around on the floor to find the millimeter sliver back onto the edit.
Suddenly this video has made me more patient with my digital work.
wow, this why we have to practice a lot before recoridng take, because its expensive of gear and experience
respect for oldschool editors...this is hell, no ty