Does tape detune guitars slightly?

Ah I just found this amazing new site called Google that tells you everything! . Seems it’s the wow & flutter settings, my bad.

Thought it was odd the acoustics and electrics sounded out of tune with each other…couldn’t sort out why since we tune religiously when tracking.

Record a sine wave and listen back to the effect the emulation is having on it.

Personally, that slight “falling of a cliff” effect of tape echo is something I love on guitars.

That modulation of the wow and flutter would actually be the reason for me to use the tape plug. Guitars often sound pretty flat without a hunch of modulation blended in. I usually reach for dimension d but a tape will give similar quality to create depth.

Wow and flutter are functions of motor and transport fluctuations, and on a well maintained machine will be fairly uniform across all tracks. The edge tracks are more susceptible to damage though…. So yeah, while wow and flutter wouldn’t even have a huge impact on a kick compared to something like piano, with lots of harmonic sustained information, I’d rather put less critical elements on the edge tracks. Around here, hi hat always ends up on track one. (And always sounds best with the fader at -infinity.)

You know, it's so long ago since I tracked to 16 or 24 track tape that I'd forgotten all these little idiosyncrasies.

Like storing tape tail out because of print through.
I always went to the trouble of splicing in red or green leader tape so I knew how the tape was being stored.

Ah .... the good old days :-)




 

I think it was green for the start of the tape and red for the tail.

I was a deft hand at splicing - I could even splice into a drum fill

The faster the tape speed the easier the splice as the window was obviously bigger.

Non-linear DAW has made me a lazy performer in many ways, with tape you rehearsed way more to keep edits to an absolute minimum!

Also of the tape tensioners.. On the older motors, the speed was not regulated well so the tape tension would bounce and the tensioners would take up the slack, but that springy nature would flap the edges of the tape some.  Tape that is too tight tends to curl at the edges as well.  

Overall, yes, the less critical stuff got put on the outer tracks.  Kick on one and maybe SMPTE on the other, or cowbell or something.

Right, but only guitars. Pianos, clarinets and tubular bells should not be affected.

Ok, I jest.

A tape plug-in is just a PLUG-IN. It’s code, not tape. If some programmer fools around with latency or other alteration of time/speed, it’s the programmer’s intention. But it has nothing to do with real analog recording.

If it was, we all could be not stand to listen to all those great 20th century records. Yes?

What's more critical than kick?! 

Hey it worked for The Beatles though.

Maybe try summing both of those busses to another "ALL GTRS" bus. and put it on that one.  That would be more like how you'd hear it in the wild... 

Please allow a guy who's owned Studer's and made a bunch of records on analog tape to comment... 

In a word? No. Any good real world, well functioning tape machine shouldn't make anything sound "out of tune" or even slightly detuned. If & when we did hear something like that? Sessions stopped until the problem is fixed. 

And if / when there was any doubt -- OR -- just doing varispeed tricks -- Standard practice was to record A440 tuning note off a synth... plugged into the nice rack or strobe tuner (we do all have good tuners in the studio yes?!?) - and look at the output of the tape machine to verify that its actually in tune and not wavering. 

The vast majority of 'tape plugz' I've tried, including the UAD stuff are almost like cartoon versions of tape machines. We get an exaggerated effect, kinda like kicking on a tube screamer or right... someone said dimension D. Actual tape is much, much more subtle. So subtle we shouldn't notice it much if at all. 

Back in the day, and I came up at the very tail end of when making records on tape was the only option... we all busted our balls trying to keep the tape machines as well aligned as possible. Both physical transport & playback electronics would get tweaked & touched up daily. Not much unlike a racecar or a prayer ritual... or some of both really... 

The goal was always to have the tape machine output, what's coming off the repro head sound like what was being fed INTO the tape machine input with as little coloration as possible. If there was a big drop, like a 2 or 3dB difference in top end... level... tuning wasn't stable? The machine has a problem. Work stops. 

Prime example? Steely Dan. Black Cow. Roger Nichols. That's some of the cleanest, most digital sounding west coast shit we've ever heard and it was 1977 analog tape. Not dirty. Not out of tune. Love it.