I searched the forum and didn’t find any hits.
I’m curious to hear if anyone still uses old tape multitracks for their projects. I just picked up a yamaha mt120 and plan to use it with my MDUW. Personally it seems like a decent stopgap in terms of having a phrase sampler, I’ve also watched most of the youtube videos that show drone musicians playing basic chords by recording single notes on tape-loops.
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I have an old tascam 8 track 1/4 machine but I rarely use it unfortunately. I should really get it worked into my setup better.
I have a buddy who heavily abuses a cassette portastudio for electronic music. It’s a great effect if you don’t need to rely on it for clean mixdowns. Just bounce drums and bass thru it with some crazy amp and tape saturation and blend it back into the track for crazy glue.
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yamaha MT120s here, it rules.
Pitch shift is very smooth and natural. It’s a great sampler and remixer. It is also a great mixer, with eq and the line-mic-overdrive.
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Yeah, old Portastudio here. I mainly use it to get some LoFi ambient character to loops. Great for drones.
Turn Noise Reduction off, turn the pitch all the way UP, record your synth line or loop.
Then reset the pitch (or set it to the lowest setting) and play it back. Resample.
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Also another great use is just to use it as an effects send, just to add character and possibly distortion.
No need to record anything, just hit the inputs fairly hard and see what kind of harmonic distortion you can achieve.
Resample.
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I’ve recently been running some synths through a Boss RE- 20 pedal going into an 8 track Fostex 1/4" machine for a poor mans 201. Sounds quite convincing when using a tape loop and creating reel tape delay along with the emulation.
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A tascam portastudio played a big part in luring me back into making music again. For a few months all I did is make EP’s. It was sort of a game and I would fit as many songs on a tape as I could with the purpose of picking three or four tracks
that would make a good combo.
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Yes, my studio is built around tape nowadays!
Obsessed with tape and use a Portastudio 414, Teac A-3340s, Tascam 38 with my OT,MDUW and RYTM. I have one tape machine per elektron to keep it saturated and rinsed:jack_o_lantern:
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It’s been high up on my list of things to experiment with for quite some time - but finding a tape recorder within my budget that’s not a clapped out piece of junk has been a bit of a problem. I’ll probably end up getting a 2-track cassette though, as I’m mostly interested in it as an fx unit.
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I’ve been considering a tape multitrack, mainly because I want to experiment with saturation.
Just curious if there any particular units out there that are thought to be real gems, in terms of sound quality, features, and integration with a modern home studio? I would particularly be interested to know about Japanese brands since I live in Tokyo and it’s easier to find old Japanese gear on the auctions.
This is not top priority for me now, but I would like to keep my eyes peeled for bargains.
Thanks.
I wonder if there are any manual movement tape recorders. It might be fun/interesting to slow down or speed up the tape as it’s recording
Kickstart Project!
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Should be a fairly simple hack to DIY your own tape speed control:
https://b0b.com/infoedu/slowtape.html
(edit: apparently there’s a few out there that have built in tape speed control - marantz, sony)
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I saw an overhauled one of these for sale over here. Looks amazing:
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take a look at Hainbach…
He uses a lot of taps and his way of making music is full of inspiring ideas.
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Wil try that!
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I use a Yamaha Mt4x 4 track recorder overloaded and achieve great saturation and a kind of glue into my music. I had mine for 50€, like new and it’s a really good piece of kit.
This song rely heavyli on the 4 track https://m.soundcloud.com/user-588788063/too-late-to-run-i-guess
Recorded live with the onboard EQ with no other fx. It’s MS20->A4->4 tracks and Rytm->4 tracks
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Oh man, that sounds great!
porta studio mkii 04
This one I used similarly to saturate the whole mix and it’s range from subtle to full on blown out sounds nice
Nice, glad you liked it. One draw back I noticed recently is that you loose a bit of the stereo image while pushing the mixer in the red. Still workable anyway.
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Pitch adjust a pretty much a standard feature on cassette multitracks.
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