Recording Straight Onto Cassette Tape Help!

that we now have cds, but at work, all they got is a smallish radio with fm/cd/tape but the cd player is bust :(

anyway. after recording some of my drum’n’bass shit onto tape, i think i might of pushed the levels too high? does this coarse the bass to fade away?

if you use tapes better aim for chrome-tapes (CRO2 I think) and record with the input gain set so that you end up with +2 to +4 db (slight overcompression) on your level-meter. tapes are abit dim on the bass-side, so it’s not a bad idea to turn that up some more, and use some dolby noise-reduction if avaiable. Also keep in mind that tapes degrade rapidly over time (the magnetic layer), tapes more than three years old are usually crap.

actually alot of techno-people back in the 90s used tapes as some kind of mastering-compressor, I know for fact that laurent garnier used this for all music he made back then … he recorded the final track on a chrome-tape and used those tapes to cut them to vinyl. But this might be pretty outdated now. But “tape-saturation” is a thing alot of VSTs claim to accomplish.

Actually I still own a studio-level tapedeck from yamaha with dolby b/c/mpx and a few other nifty features which did cost me quite alot of money when I bought it second-hand back in 96 (I think around 500 DM (~250 ¤) and that’s only because the guy who sold it was desperately needing money)

:w00t: :yeah: thanks for the great reply, will do somthing with what you’ve said.

Everything looza said applies. I used tapes for ages when friends were using CDs, and i still fantasize about starting a tape-only label. There’s serious warmth to be found in a good tape recording.

Get a proper tape deck is #1. If it’s dolby noise reduction enabled, and you got some good chrome tapes, check your highest level, tune your deck to it, and let it rip. For most home-listening uses, this is super fine

With anything like this, you should be using it to smash your sound in the way you want, then putting it back in the computer an layering it with your tight pure synth stuff…

This is the path to slam heaven.