Why Is It That People Who Are Nostalgic For Tape Never Actually Used Tape In A Studio?
Once upon a time, audio recordings were done to magnetic tape. Period. It might have been 2 inch or 1 inch, or even ½ inch, but it was always tape. Even in the early days of digital recording we still hadn’t unencumbered ourselves from tape. Early digital formats like ADAT and DTRS were still based on magnetic tape. In this article, Steve DeMott asks why is it that people who are nostalgic for tape never actually used tape? Surely we’ve never had it so good?
These days tape is a buzzword, and the virtues and myths of tape are extolled by far more people than I believe could actually be using it. So, let’s see if we can bypass all the rhetoric, and talk about tape from the realistic point of view of studio economics. I don’t just mean the hard costs of tape, but also the less obvious costs of time and convenience.
This article is not about arguing as to which sounds better, because that’s subjective. What I want to do is take a look at tape from the perspective of a modern studio workflow. I also want to help educate those that may be thinking about tape and wondering if they want to invest in it.
I started recording in the latter days of analogue tape. I realistically spent the first 12 years of my recording career recording to magnetic tape. I still have 2 Otari tape decks in my studio. I will admit that they don’t get a lot of use now. I’m primarily DAW-based because it affords me the speed, flexibility and recallability that I need to stay on top of client requests, which always seem to fall somewhere in the “I need it from you yesterday, but I won’t have it to you until tomorrow” range. It’s a workflow decision.
Getting Started - Using A DAW
How did you start your last session? My DAW sessions consistently start like this:
Launch Pro Tools
Choose a template
I have a template for each kind of session I typically run.
Choose I/O settings
I have two I/O presets, one for each space I work from.
Click “Create”
Name project
Save Session to work drive
Get to work
Total time: less than a minute, even after waffling over the perfect project name.
Getting Started - Using An Analogue Tape Machine
In contrast, a tape session starts likes this:
Clean the tape machine. Always. Every time you use it, that’s the rule!
Mount the calibration tape
Check deck calibration, and adjust if necessary (yes, before every session!)
Put the calibration reel back
Get a reel of tape from the shelf
Mount the reel to the tape deck
Splice on some leader to the “head” of the tape
Thread the tape onto the takeup reel, but not over the heads yet
Jog the tape (this reduces the likelihood of the tape bunching up or catching during the session, and only needs to be done on new tape)
Fast Forward the tape onto the takeup reel
Splice on a leader to the “tail” of the tape
Rewind the tape back onto its reel
Thread the tape through the tape guide, roller, over the heads, through the capstan and onto the takeup reel
Arm all tracks, and enable the oscillator on the deck
Print test tones, 30 seconds (give or take) each of:
100Hz
1kHz
10kHz
Splice in some leader just after the test tones
Get to work
Total time: I could get this done in about 10 minutes,as long as I don’t have to fiddle with the calibration too much.
If I know it’s a longer session, like an album project, I may need to repeat steps 5-13 for each additional reel of tape I need to prepare for the session. That adds additional prep time. You weren’t in a rush, were you?
Bump, Roll, Squeeze And Saturate
No, it’s not a new dance craze. Bump, roll, squeeze and saturate are the things that tape does to your sound. Bump refers to the low-end boost, roll refers to the high-end roll-off, squeeze refers to the compression that tape adds to the signal, and saturate is the high-frequency distortion (saturation) that tape adds to the recorded signal.
One of the learning curves with analogue magnetic tape has always been trying to stay one step ahead of how it will change the sounds you are printing to it. In the simplest terms, you could say, input ≠ output. What you put into tape is not what you get out of it. Now, as the technology advanced, tape formulations and tape decks became better and better, but they never reached the linearity of even the most modest of today’s audio interfaces, let alone the mid-level or high-end interfaces many professionals use. Even the legendary Studer A827, which was considered to be about as “natural” a response as you could achieve, had several dips and bumps throughout its response. At 30ips it had a bump around 40Hz, a dip around 75Hz that moved into a boost around 120Hz, and then a slight scoop between 4k and about 10k. It wasn’t nearly as flat at 15ips, with a low-end bump that starts way down at 20Hz, and doesn’t flatten out until it hits somewhere around 90Hz, and then starts a roll-off again at 1kHz, and stays down from thereon.
Tape Compression
Tape also has the habit of acting like a soft knee, low ratio compressor. It tames peaks, mostly because it’s trying to keep up. It can’t react fast enough to the transients and therefore acts as a compressor. This is one of the reasons for the increasing tape speeds. Faster speeds yield lower compression amounts and better capture of transients and high end in general.
For all the dulling of the signal that the tape squeeze adds, tape saturation adds some very pleasant high-end harmonics. Well, pleasant if you don’t push it too hard. If you push it too hard, it’s quite nasty, and can ruin a session real fast. You also don’t want to let the signal come in too low. We’re fighting against a very real noise floor with limited dynamic range. You want signals peaking as close to zero on the VU as possible. Too much past that, and you risk getting into the nasty part of tape saturation. Too much below, and you can really hear the noise floor. Learning how hot to hit the tape is part science and part black magic. You can only relate to that if you’ve experienced it.
So we had to know how tape was going to change the sound, and account for it upfront. Sometimes we’d over or under bias a deck to try to flatten it out. Often we just knew how much “extra” of things we needed to add. How did we know? Trial and error was some of it, but so was shared knowledge. Some of us were lucky enough to inherit knowledge from those that did this before us, and were kind enough to take us under their wings, and give us the benefit of their experience.
Mistakes Were Made
Do you make mistakes while working? I know I do. I’m usually working fast, with deadlines looming, and constant client communications firing back and forth, changes and updates coming all the time. It’s inevitable that mistakes happen. Either from distraction, lack of focus, or just from being a step ahead of client revisions, and having to back up.
What happened the last time you made a mistake in your DAW? I was just mastering some audio for a client, and I accidentally trimmed where I didn’t mean to. But, I didn’t even flinch. A quick Command+Z, and I’m fine. No more than half a second of extra effort. In fact, 99% of my mistakes are the type that don’t cause any stress or anxiety. I just undo and move on without a second thought.
I’ve even accidentally left a track record armed while thinking I was recording to a different track. I was able to fix my mistake by selecting the newly recorded audio that I didn’t want, and hit delete. It was gone, and the original audio was right there. No biggie.
Now, I’ve also done that on tape. So, I just...hit...the… Uh oh! That’s right, there’s no undo in the tape world. We are performing without a net. So I had to tell everyone about my mistake, and we needed to re-record the part. That’s wasted time and effort.
What about problems that aren’t anyone’s fault? Issues like a tape breaking or catching (it happens). Usually, it kills a whole section of material, and you have little choice but to re-record.
The reality of tape is that you have to slow down, and really think about what you’re doing. Mistakes are costly.
What Does It Cost?
Speaking of costs, did I mention that tape comes with additional costs? Tape is a finite medium, much like hard drive space is finite. The big difference is in how finite tape is. Let’s compare.
I don’t charge clients for hard drives anymore. At the end of a project I’m happy to digitally deliver all the assets, or put them on a client supplied drive.
I do, however, charge for tape. Tape is expensive and adds to the cost of the project. For some clients, this alone is enough of a deterrent to stay digital. Especially when you realize an album project is typically going to take 3-4 reels of tape (at 30 ips), plus one more if we mixdown to tape on the 2-track deck.
I can get a 1TB SSD G-Drive for $160 on Amazon right now*. So let’s use that as our digital basis. Let’s keep the calculations at 24-bits and for 24 tracks, since that would be the limit of a 2” tape deck.
Media Costs: Digital Recording
Now let’s look at tape cost. It costs about $200 for a standard 2500’ tape reel. Tape speed is measured in inches per second (ips). The recording time listed in the chart below is for the full length of tape. In reality you won’t be able to use every available second of tape. Even just printing the calibration tones, if you manage to get exactly 1 second between tones, you use up 1:33 of precious tape.
Media Costs: Analogue Tape
It’s very unlikely you would use 7.5 ips. It’s quite coarse. If you were going for a retro sound you might use 15 ips, but I’d guess most will go to 30 ips. 30 ips has been the standard tape speed pretty much since it became available. You get much better frequency response at faster speeds.
As you can see, tape costs 2,000% more than an SSD drive. That kind of upcharge makes Apple’s memory prices seem like a bargain.
The (Imaginary) Project
Let’s imagine we have a client project that we’re going to price out for both digital and analogue recording. Let’s even pretend that we can move equally as fast in both formats.
Let’s also imagine that the band is well-rehearsed, and can come in and nail the songs in 1 take (with some overdubs). They have 12 songs they want to lay down, with the option of dropping the weakest 1 or 2 from the release. The songs average that magic 3:30 runtime.
So, 12 songs at 3:30 each = 42 minutes. Then let’s add 20% to that for the stuff that will get edited/faded/etc. That means we’re looking at 50 minutes of material.
Let’s say we agreed on 3 days of studio time for recording and mixing at $600/day, or $1800.
Experience tells me that with typical 3:30 minute songs I’ll get 3 songs per tape reel. That means I will need 4 reels of tape for this project. 4 tape reels at 30 ips gives about 64 minutes of record time. So, we have enough for the projected 50 minutes of material. Let’s also assume they want to mixdown to digital to get a step closer to their digital delivery needs.
The cost for the digital recording is $1800.00
$1,800 Studio time, recording and mixing
The cost for analogue recording is: $2,600.00
$1,800 Studio time, recording and mixing
$800 4 reels of tape
As you can see, the cost of the tape adds significantly to the cost of the project. The upcharge for the tape makes the project 44% more expensive.
In Conclusion
I think we can all agree that tape can still be relevant in some cases, but for those who have been wondering if they want to get involved with tape for the first time, I hope this article has helped put the process of recording to tape into perspective. Analogue tape recording presents unique limitations that add extra time, planning, and costs to the creative process.
* Prices correct at time of first publication (April 2020)