About five years ago when I had a mid life crisis, decided to drastically downsize my digital home recording facility and set up a 1990s-spec, tape-based studio in the space, I saw the tape studio serving as an occasional change. But it’s actually seen more use than the digital studio.
The digital studio is more capable, controlled and precise, and much easier to use, but tape has easily won the battle for attention. This year, I’ve started to ask myself why. Here are six key answers…
1. Remix potential. The tape studio’s most obvious USP has been its access to old multitrack recordings. These are raw, unmixed sets of sound components, stored on a huge array of high bias tape cassettes. They were all recorded in the 1980s or 1990s. None of them can be remixed without a Portastudio, but some of them can’t even be remixed without a full studio of hardware instruments, because they were recorded with timecode, to incorporate live sequencing right up to the mastering stage.
Remixing these old recordings is often very exciting, because the individual tracks can be exported into the digital domain, where they can be edited and processed in ways that were not possible in a home studio thirty plus years ago. Some of the results have been amazing. And that inspires further work in the tape studio.
2. Museum value. Everyone loves a museum. And in the 2020s, that’s what a tape-based home recording studio is. In a world built around smartphones, stepping away and reassociating with the past can be very therapeutic. It has nostalgia, and a physical (as opposed to virtual) experience, which stimulates more senses.
3. Nature. A digital recording setup is precisely controlled, and that filters out the effects of nature. But with tape recording, nature has a firm hand in the result. Analogue media has character, and temperament, and the whole process of getting a signal onto tape is rich with unpredictability. The nuances that nature introduces into an analogue recording make it unique. You can’t simply dial up the same settings in a month’s time and get precisely what you got before. And neither can anyone else. You will only get that exact sound once.
4. Challenge. Challenge is one of the biggest motivators us humans encounter. If you know you can do something, and you know exactly how it’s going to turn out, you don’t have any curiosity to satisfy. But once you start thinking: “I wonder if this would work?“, your curiosity may well prompt you to find out. Because there are many more unknowns in a tape studio than there are in a digital studio, there’s more curiosity to satisfy, more challenge, and thus more motivation to undertake projects.
5. Inspiration. As creatures who absorb what’s around us, we can easily get locked into our time, and struggle to come up with something new. But revisiting processes you used decades ago, as well as individual sequences you played decades ago, can re-trigger long lost techniques. Quite a proportion of the time I’ve spent in the tape stuido has involved re-learning old ideas. But because I’ve developed as a musican in the interim, I can usually find better ways to play them. That creates something new, which would not have developed without that visit to the past.
6. Reward. Whether you’re doing something the hard way and winning, or reaching back through time to grab a 30+ year old unfinished recording and rescue it, you’re going to get a feeling of extra satisfaction. You’ve learned more, you’ve experienced more, and you’ve achieved more.
Digital workstations are amazing things, and technology has brought immense progress to recording. But sometimes technology can be so dominant that it starts to control you. Tape allows you to get away from that, and return to a world where everything, for better or for worse, is controlled by you, not for you.
Tape Tardis 