Drum and tape – a match made in heaven
It’s often said that drums and tape make the perfect pairing, but why? And is this still a meaningful suggestion in the digital age?
If you’ve ever recorded drums on a highquality professional multitrack tape machine, the experience of playing them back and hearing the sound change can be both exciting and unnerving. Tape typically applies a level of mid- to high-frequency smoothness, overall glue and subtle compression to the sound. However, the degree to which this occurs is dependent on many small factors, and it can be pretty baffling knowing how to use it to your advantage.
The factors involved include the level captured to tape, the tape type, tape speed (and the inherent head bump or bass boost associated with it), the choice of EQ curve and, of course, the type of machine used. And to make matters even more complicated, a tape machine has two heads – sync and repro – which sound slightly different to each other. The first can record and play back, with heads physically lined up to enable overdubs to be carried out perfectly in time; the second offers a higherquality ‘playback-only’ solution for when you get to the mixing stage. Typically, you’ll be listening on the sync head when tracking and making recording decisions.
Broadly speaking, analogue tape affects an audio signal in a beneficial way, but there are some changes that may arise which are less desirable, including crosstalk, print-through, edge tracks, softening of transients and tape hiss. The last of these can become quite significant if you EQ high frequencies heavily after recording. Thankfully, the plugin emulations we’re using in this tutorial focus on the positives, so although you might be able to dial in some tape noise if you want it, you can thankfully switch it out or turn it down if it’s becoming a problem.
In this walkthrough, we’ll put the emulated tape/drum combination to the test. Unlike in the analogue world, we can adjust our drum tracks individually, deciding how much tape effect is applied to each. We can also adjust the tape type and line-up individually.
Tape affects an audio signal in a beneficial way, but undesirable changes may arise