10 Effects... with no digital gear

everybody so we're here at uptown recording studios in Chicago today we're recording with this tape machine a lot of the effects that I use just in my DAW in my digital workstation all my pedals have their roots in analog recording machines I have a list of effects that I use a lot and I'm gonna see if using this machine and with resident tape expert Rob Rishi here if we can get those effects using just tape using just analog two-inch tape 16 track and it actually used to be owned by Merle Haggard so it used to be on his tour bus and now it's on the internet so the first effect I have is reverse yeah so first thing I do is I've been off the tape the Beatles would go out to lunch they never even would see how would you do if you wanted to record a reverse part in a song you would have to make your marks where Ann wanted the reverse park to start and stop do this whole thing we're doing find that section and you mark it with like T for top and Ephraim hand or whatever so that your eithe n is first and your T is Latin afterwards yeah and then when you flip it back to do your playback it then is proper top and end [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay that's the end upside-down so then for me to hear it I need to actually catch in 13 now because that was four and now it's 13 all right [Music] I actually kind of like that all right so reverse can definitely be done and it's a way it's way harder than I anticipated what is it just right-click well could we see what it on Pro Tools is Reavers that's how quickly it is yeah the next one is just speeding up and slowing down this one seems like it should be easy simply recording to it going slower and then bringing it back up to normal speed vice versa yes with tape when it changes speed of course it also changes pitch yes you're gonna record something at one tempo and whatever tempo it is it's double when you play it back at the higher speed on it so on this machine is 15 inches per second the highest 30 okay so if we recorded 15 inches a second bring it up to 30th then we're going up an octave and be twice as bad yes okay [Music] okay [Music] cool flow down his neck slow down you do the opposite yeah alright I haven't prepared for this [Music] all right well we can definitely slide down yes next one up is varying speed and so you're modulating speed and pitch at the same time instead of just both being half as fast or half as slow your variable is coming in okay all right I'm walking down the street Oh what's up Samantha how are you doing I'm doing fine with the wormhole thing if you get a shot of this this is really like kind of high-tech it starts moving when you touch it it's actually a capacitive mm-hmm so it relies on the skin that's kind of amazing that they have that in the seventies okay all right I'm walking down the street Oh what's up Samantha how are you doing [Laughter] [Music] sounds like a make me bad 35 video you guys it's really sensitive yes the tricky part is I'm imagining that this just controls the speed but of course if this gets going yeah it doesn't just like stop think we nailed that one yeah the next one I have though is flanger and I believe that you need two machines for that you have to have a secondary machine playing back the same source and then you vary the speed between the two machines with two people operating them and one person slightly varying the speed like by 20 milliseconds by pushing on the actual what they call flange which is this part of the reel oh so that's where that's where the word okay works landing meaning like this is I wasn't pushing slightly on mine and you were pushing slightly on yours in different ways and it would create this difference in time of the same source and so your pan that left and right and you became stereo flanger so we actually need two of these to get flanger and one would just be running normally and then another one a person would be pressing down on this and it would sound like this but we didn't actually do it [Music] so we could actually do chorus then you're saying oh yeah actually you record two things one pass of one thing yeah record another pass at the same thing oh and that's just chorus people used to use chorus pedals to grip the thicker doubler event we're on a local I can put a chorus on your voice to make it sound like you sang it twice wire is called a chorus because it's multiple voices singing Nessun so I'm gonna play through something twice on two tracks and we just pan wait are we supposed to be recording it into the tape isn't that the oh yeah we're just so used to yeah just recorded into there we forgot the entire reason why oh yes [Music] so now you're going to be hearing your original and performing with it as closely as you can [Music] [Music] I changed it up yeah yeah absolutely so this one's a bit of a workaround since it's just double tracking but I'm gonna say chorus we got it yeah tremolo does that count thank you I mean it's not really at a perfect but tremolo yeah volume so the next one I have up is Distortion okay ideas like why a lot of people use tape still because of the natural the unsaturated data overload the signal pin the needle lens of the red and even though that red stops it +3 it still has another 6 DB before it'll even distort clipping is a digital artifact that happens when it reaches 0 but there is no 0 in the analog world so then we should do an acoustic guitar track and then I'm just gonna have to yell as loud as I can whoa [Laughter] [Music] I definitely just started yeah distortion done you can actually see the waveform doesn't square up the same way that a digital distortion squares there's never any Apple right angle yeah yeah this word digital it would be right angles of square waves next up is delay for this we're gonna use tape delay as I know if there's two play heads on the tape there's a record head yeah that is also an input so that is when you're doing your initial track and then there's a repro head which is a reproduction head or playback head that's 86 milliseconds behind so the two play heads on a tape machine give you a delay hence where tape delay comes from yeah now if I add the repro head so you're hearing your guitar real time and you're your tire off later yeah let's do play through this [Music] the way definitely worked so the last thing I had on my list for tape it's just that tape slowed down whenever you stop the tape goes boom yeah tape stop so I got something for that let's set up a microphone damn but we are rolling hey everybody thanks for watching this video you can subscribe if you would like this isn't the last time we do something like this on this channel and here are the other videos we also filmed while working with the tape machine and here's patreon if you want to see videos early and it just helps us fund these videos so yeah thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Rob Scallon

Views: 1,104,368

Rating: 4.9550653 out of 5

Keywords: Rob, Scallon, music, musician, guitar, guitarist, reverse, speed up, slow down, chorus, tremolo, distortion, delay, tape delay, tape, recording to tape, 1970's, equipment, recording equipment, reel to reel, wax recording, technology, history, analog recording, recording studio, acoustic, acoustic guitar, bass, instrument, rob scallon, 16 track, analog, without pedals, flanger, song challenge, without effects, 10 effects, Rob Scallon, challenge, getting effects, audio, techmoan, digital, no digital

Id: 9dkyqZdOlpc

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/tehbertl]

The fun starts at 5:22, in case the link doesn't go to the proper time stamp.

[u/[deleted]]

Rob is such a cool dude. Love his content! Talented as fuck!

[u/sbs1138]

Funniest one on here in a good while.

[u/JesterOfDestiny]

Fuck, I should have looked before posting the same thing.

[u/MozleyCarmen]

I just deleted my link to this haha. You gotta be faster out here in Reddit. For an explanation to what the effect is start at 5:11. Great vid thanks for sharing!

[u/xhighalert]

BALALBLALBLALBLAAL FWOOO^OOOOOOP!

--NO!!