Tape Return

When I started out on my recording journey as a very green 13-year old, digital recording was barely a thing at the high-end of the recording business let alone for the home enthusiast. My first experiences of overdubbing consisted of bouncing audio between two cassette decks with horrendous amounts of noise and audio degradation. My idea of hi-fi was saving up for a chrome II tape and using the Dolby noise-reduction switches on my crappy cassette decks. Nevertheless, I was hooked very early on the possibilities of recording sound onto sound. It’s probably safe to say I experienced the very worst aspects of analogue tape recording right at the start — terrible noise and degradation issues, very limited track counts and the necessity of un-redoable submixing.

CROSS TALK

As the years went by I progressed from cassettes to four-track 1/4-inch, to eight-track 1/2-inch multi-track machines and entered the world of high-fidelity tape recording. With my all-round recording skills steadily improving, those early experiments served me well. I knew how to squeeze the absolute maximum out of every device I had, I knew how to make on-the-fly decisions that would benefit the final outcome and how to keep things lean and mean. I loved tape and the discipline of recording to simple low track-count machines. Still, once I got my first hard drive computer recording system in the ’90s, my tape machines and analogue mixers quickly got sold off or leant out to unreliable friends, until all I had left to show for all that earlier analogue know-how were some boxes of old reel-to-reel tapes.

I jumped boots first into the wonderful world of digital recording and didn’t look back. I couldn’t believe the fun I was having flipping things backwards, racking up big track counts, exploring the emerging world of digital plug-ins, looping beats, cutting and pasting, totally re-arranging songs post-tracking and all the other previously impossible things the new technology