This isn’t supposed to rubbish the possibilities offered by the options presented by plugin versions of tape machines. Virtual Is Fast, Fast Helps In Comparisons As for tweaking the bias of valve amplifiers, I’m glad we didn’t get curious about that as we did have a Fender Dual Showman (which was strictly for bass) and the idea of my early twenties self poking around the back of that with a screwdriver isn’t great and could have ended with a 450V handshake and a smoking pair of shoes! Amplifier choice was limited to “Do you want to use the guitar amp or not?” in our studio. I see similar potential in some guitarist’s attitudes to virtual amplifiers. If I’d started to mess with the bias settings, I’d have been shouted at! The point I’m making is that people who are only familiar with tape in its virtual form might be getting the wrong impression of what using tape was like for those of us who were using it in the project studio space in the days when tape was a current technology rather than an aesthetic choice, or even an affectation. From memory, it was Ampex 456 until we mysteriously changed to 3M 996 which was obviously better because the spools were anodised gold!.Īs a young engineer, the only setup I did on the tape machine was to clean the tape path. That was dictated by which calibration tape he had.
The brand of tape was dictated by which formulation the machine was set up for last time Graham, the tech, and the only person in the building who knew anything more about maintenance than which end of the soldering iron you shouldn’t pick it up by, had set it up for. In the backstreet studio I was working in in the mid-nineties it was between quite old and very old tape. In the same way, when it came to tape choice, for anything but the “posh jobs” the choice wasn’t even between new or old tape. Steely Dan may have been able to afford 30ips but the people I was working with didn’t have the same tape budget. When faced with the choice between 15 and 30ips the choice was dictated by the cost of the tape you were going to be using rather than the sonic benefits. In the days of real tape, for most of us, the sound wasn’t the deciding factor.
How the reality of using them compares to a real tape machine and however much we might wish we had the real thing, in some, less obvious ways, virtual tape can be better.Īs someone who is just old enough to have worked in a tape-based studio when magnetic tape was still the natural choice because digital media were still expensive, esoteric and unusual, I always notice when I come across discussions of virtual tape formulations or the frequency responses of different tape speeds. In this article, inspired by a free video excerpt from PureMix, Julian considers virtual tape plugins.
0 kommentar(er)
