TubularCorporation

I'm not sure of the exact science of it but speed fluctuations at lower tape speeds cause way more noticeable pitch changes, too. I assume it has something to do with pitch being logarithmic. You should keep your eye out for microcassette recorders and answering machines if you want to go really lo fi, too.

Oh, one more tip - if you're gong to be recording to the tape really hot to make it saturate, turn off the noise reduction! Noise reduction, especially DBX, compresses the incoming audio and more or less limits the strength of the signal that can actually reach the tape, so if you record loud it makes the noise reduction sound worse but it doesn't actually give you that tape saturation sound you're probably after. I didn't know that for a long time, and all of my old 4 track recordings would have probably been a lot better if I'd known that the hot input signal and the DBX were actually working against each other so neither one was really doing what it was supposed to do.

I struggle with that, too. An old VCR might be worth picking up, too. Go for stereo but don't bother looking for a hi-fi S-VHS machine if you want dirt - they kind of sound too good (although they do compress really nicely and don't cost much at all these days, I have one because I was transferring the surviving remains of my old VHS collection a couple years ago but for dirtying stuff up it's better in standard mode with a standard VHS tape). youcan also play around with recording with noise reduction off and playing back with noise reduction on, and using type I tapes in your 4 track (they're almost all designed for Type II only so type 1 sounds not so good). In general, type I tapes tend to have more low end at the expense of more distortion and less high end and more noise, so they're a good bet for the purposes we're talking about. Just read up on how to get the best performance out of cassettes and then do the opposite. I've got a bunch of blanks I scored years ago from a defunct DIY punk label and I've been thinking about starting to experiment with recording on them, heating them up in the toaster oven until the case just starts to look a bit melted, and then moving the tape into a non-melted case if necessary and playing it back into the computer for that "left on the dashboard all summer" sound. The down side of cassette is that despite what people think, it can actually sound really good.

Another fun but more subtle thing is to ind 600ohm - 600ohm audio isolation transformers and wire them straight to 1/4" jacks. Studio types do this with high end transformers to get a bit of classy summing buss type coloration but you can do it just as easily (and a lot cheaper) with shitty transformers to get shitty summing buss type coloration, which is a lot more fun. If you want a really ugly sound, pick up one of those cheap isolation transformers they sell on Amazon for getting rid of ground loops in car stereos. I got one years ago to protect the SID in my c64 from voltage spikes and it sounded way too bad to use for that but it's definitely useful for dirtying things up and taking out a lot of high end. This isn't the exact one I have but it's the same thing. The single one star review says it all. And just in general, impedence mismatches aren't always a bad thing.

totally agree! some tracks simply need lo-fi-lization My MO lately is to get a pretty hi-fi mix going (I mean, relatively hi-fi, I'm still using a lot of semi shitty gear before it hits the converters) and then when I've gotten that where I want it I dump the whole thing out onto cassette or VHS, maybe through some kind of mid grade old home stereo equipment, to kind of simulate the "produced in a real studio, distributed on a consumer medium and then played back on consumer equipment" sound. Since pretty much every modern playback device is relatively neutral (other than the speakers of course) there's all sorts of potential for creating an entire imaginary listening environment (other than the speakers) that way. Not a big, new idea but I don't really hear people framing it that way much, usually it's more jsut "copy it to a tape to warm it up" or something, even if what they're really doing is exactly what I'm doing - making a digital file probably streamed over the Internet sound kind of like it's coming out of a cheap cassette boombox in 1990, for example. There are a lot of really interesting consumer and semi-pro "enhancers" and "spacializers" and things that were sold for home stereos and especially home theater systems in the 80s that are dirt cheap today and a lot of fun for this stuff. My current favorite is the Vidicraft Stereo Synthesizer: I think they're fairly rare (they seem to have been aimed more at the semi-pro market too, mine's really overbuilt) but when they do show up nobody wants them. I paid I think $22 on eBay and I'm sure it would be half that if you could find one locally. 4 inputs, 6(!) outputs (different combinations of outputs all seem to sound different, too - L1 and L2 sound completely different a a stereo pair than L1 and R1 for example), wet/dry mix, odd sounding band-limited panning that's sweepable separately in the lows and highs, a surpriingly nice sounding nonresonant lowpass filter and a pleasantly shitty sounding one knob compressor ("dynamic noise reduction"); the spacialization, filter and compressor can be switched in and out independently. I haven't even gotten in to using it in a feedback loop or anything like that yet, but it's great for making pads sound thick and blurry, and the compressor seems like it'll be good for drum machines although I haven't messed with that much yet. Omnisonix 801 Omnisonic Imager is another good one, had that for years. Just a simple Carver "sonic holography" knockoff (I forget what they do exactly but it's some kind of basic "crossfeed delayed/phase inverted versions of the stereo channels" idea that's been around since the late 60s), all BBD stuff so it's not very accurate but it really does make stuff sound wider and is great on pads, especially if you mess with M/S processing upstream in the signal path and kind of confuse it so it makes the "widening" get unstable and swirly around. Paid around $15 for that one. There are a few early THX surround preamps from the late 80s that show up really cheap now that had some digital spacialization stuff for faking surround from mono or stereo inputs, and usually had some digital reverbs built in too, and I've been thinking about grabbing one of those for a couple years now but the one time I found one at a good enough price the seller refused to ship it because it only went for $16 with free international shipping from Greece (can't say I blame him although if you aren't willing to sell something for $10 with free international shipping don't start your auction at $10 with free international shipping).

Yeah, I misread your post, then responded, then realized I'd misread and hoped nobody would notice. Although sometimes that lower quality is actually higher quality, if you know what I mean.

/pedantry (soz) Depends on the model, as far as Tascams (the ones I've encountered the most) the Syncaset rack units were double speed only, most of the Portastudios recorded at standard and double, but the 424 MKI has three speeds, they added a half speed option for getting more continuous recording time at the expense of quality. I don't know of any other 4 track that has a third speed. Tascam dropped it for the MkII. I've never used a Portastudio that didn't do standard and double speed, though, but other brands and lines were sometimes double only. If you have one that records at standard it's convenient for bouncing, because instead of bouncing 3 tracks to a 4th mono track you can mix down all 4 to stereo on a second cassette on any standard deck, then put the mixdown cassette in the four track and have two more tracks to overdub. There are usually small issues with alignment and speed being a little off but that's part of the sound, and not really worse than the quality loss from bouncing internally, just different

Great find! I've had a CR-1a (another of their lowest end early 90s models) for a long time, found it in someone's trash about 12 years ago and it's always worked and sound great.

Awesome, thanks for sharing that.

Picked up that vinyl reissue of The Age of Candy Candy last month, still one of my absolute favorite things he's done.

I'll give you one guess where I first came up with the idea.

anyway, there was that research about clutter and creativity a few years ago, so now we've got the justification to let ourselves go. Sweepstakes, you should get that 424 out, the preamp distortion alone will never not make me grin. I love it.

For the longest time I've had a Digitech Midi Vocalist that I got in some trade I don't even remember and one of the things I've meant to try for ages is recording a single note on different tracks of a tape at the intervals you'd find on the first four drawbars of a hammond organ, and then running the output through the vocalist so I could use it in its "vocoder" mode (actually 5 voice harmonizing with MIDI control, none of the "intelligent" business) and playing the 4 track faders like drawbars. The vocalist and the similar 90s budget harmonizers I've tried have a special kind of glitchy, grainy quality to them I like when they're used on stuff other than voice (and also on voice, for that matter - they don;'t work very well which is what makes them sound interesting). This is making me think I might have to finally do it tomorrow. v lush spiral you look like a hoarder, do you need help? You're not a hoarder until you have to climb over the stuff to get in and out of the room, right?

Also the Mk I has the special third speed that's HALF the standard cassette speed, so you can get in to microcassette territory as far as lo-fi tape sound goes (or slow things down to 1/4 speed). The MkII eliminated that. I've never used a Mk III.

Totally, yeah...something magical about cassette 4-tracks. (It's amazing how much workflow influences output...workflow workflow all about the workflow) My old grey 424 that I did my first real recording on and then gave to a friend in college ended up coming back to me years later, still working great. Would never part with it again, there's really something special about them. Not justthe cassette sound, the mixer makes everything you put through it sound "worse" but so much bigger.

Yeah, thats what I would do (and am going to when ive got cash) also, dont overlook x0xb0x MarOS firmware yeah x0xb0x is also wicked...TT-303 has the looks down though :) the TB-3 basically doesn't sound as good as either of the above (has a hard digital edge and can be aliasy) the accent is all fucked up and doesn't really work properly, the touchscreen control method is shit and it's not anywhere near as useful as the TT-303 or x0xb0x - e.g. no CV, limited pattern modes, that stupid scatter thing (which is really bad), no envmod knob etc. Roland dun fucked it up. MarOS is great but I put a CPU upgrade and n0nx0x in mine last winter and it's just fantastic. I do sometimes miss the gate time adjustment from MarOS though, you can get some really cool, rhythmic, almost clavinet sounding stuff out of it with really short gate times.

If it was damaged by a piece of gear, the only other possible culprit would be the Korg i30 I got at a thrift shop a few months ago and am using as a master controller now, but that has played well with everything else I own and is in excellent shape inside and out (had to replace a key and tighten up the pitch bender, so there's not much in there I haven't seen). Again there's no way to know for sure but it seems really suspicious that it worked perfectly for two years, then worked with the Arturia for a few months and now only kind of works. It's almost definite that the optoisolator has been damaged and is now really picky about the MIDI signal it gets (in which case, good on Mutable for the MIDIpal putting out a rock solid signal!), I'll know when my Mouser order gets here. My working theory is the voltage on the MIDI output on the Beatstep was over spec or had spikes and stressed the optoisolator, but the problem didn't show up until I went back to using stuff that was in spec. No way to prove it without the BSP though. At least I can still use it as long as I buffer the incoming MIDI with the MIDIpal but fucking hell. I've only bought two Arturia products (this and a Minibrute) but both were defective out of the box. At least the Brute was so defective I caught it instantly and sent it back. Ironically, the Anushri kit is what I got with the refund. /Livejournal

Necromancing this thread to warn people that the BSP may have damaged one of my synths. I sold it a while back so I can't do any tests and say for sure, but ever since I had it hooded up to the DIN midi out of the BSP for a year or so, it's become really dodgy, the only way to get it to respond to MIDI notes at all is to run them through the MidiPAL, although it still responds to clock OK. Most likely the optoisolator o the MIDI input was damaged, and the BSP is a likely culprit, especially since the voltages I measured from the CV outputs were way out of spec sometimes. Waiting on some replacement parts so see what happens, but just know that there might be at least some BSP's out there that are dangerously defective. The CV was low when it went wrong, not high, so at least that wasn't dangerous even though it made it not work right. Really wanted to like this thing.

Saw this a few months ago. Exceeds the hype. Make sure you see the DVD version though, the Blu Ray has been heavily edited.

Yeah, that's actually more complicated than it looks. If you're messing with the surround you really need to cut off the dust cap and put shims around the inside of the voice coil to make sure that it stays in the right place, otherwise it will toch the sides, which means rubbing (sounds bad and eventually wears through the wire in the coil) or freezing up altogether. IF the surrounds are splitting they're well past needing to be replaced anyway, and you should be able to find a kit on eBay for just about any speaker for between $15 and $20 USD, which is a lot (getting the parts yourself would be maybe $5) but worth it to know everything is the right size and for the detailed instructions it should come with. If you're lucky, the voice coil was stuck but wasn't damaged and replacing the surround will fix it. Even if it needs a full recone that's possible and arguably better than replacing the entire driver. I'm not sure what to recommend as far as qualified, trustworthy speaker techs (I do this stuf because I'm perpetually broke, professionals aren't even an option I consider), and it's best to find one local if it's at all possible, to save the cost and risk of shipping the thing. But at any rate, it should still be cheaper than replacing them if it comes to that. The hardest thing about replacing the surrounds I did was getting the old ones off without damaging the cone - you have to scrape off as much glue as you can and it doesn't want to leave. But it's definitely doable if you take your time. Also make sure to not let anything, especially metal, get in to the gap between the coil and the magnet when you have that dust cap off! EDIT: I may have spoken too soon, I'm not seeing any surround replacement kits or information with some cursory Googling. Also those speakers are way beyond the 60s KLH and AR stuff I've dealt with, and definitely worth finding a professional tech to look at! If you go the DIY route, maybe contact this eBay seller and see about getting a kit for your model. I've got no affiliation with them, but I used one of their kits on my AR2ax's and it was good, well worth the money (although their prices have gone up).

Was it broken near the surround (outer edge) or the voice coil? If the voice could gets even a little out of alignment it can freeze up, and worst case scenario is that actually makes it overheat or otherwise short, which can damage a valve amp. I've replaced the surrounds in one pair of woofers and it worked but it was pretty nerve wracking. then like an idiot I used the remaining glue as a cone treatment like the instructions recommended, which apparently isn't a good idea for vintage paper cone speakers, apparently the soft paper is part of what makes them sound the way they should. Still sound good though, but not as good as the nearly identical pair they replaced. If it was just a small hole or tear in the cone that you were fixing, and it wasn't near the center or edge, I'd be surprised if you damaged them. That seems to work fine; I stuck a screwdriver through the cone of a really nice old EV guitar driver when I was putting it in my amp after a trade and just glued a piece of brown paper shopping bag soaked in watered down white glue over the hole. Been working fine ever since, and that was back in I think 2009. Is there any chance you accidentally shorted the + and - terminals on your amp when you reinstalled the speakers? Loose strand sticking out of a braided speaker wire maybe? I probably killed my tube stereo that way (can't afford to take it to a real tech and have them check it out, at the very least I blew a power tube, and replacing all four of them is out of my budget).

Seems like the way to go.I'm thinking I'll order four o the standoffs (for the corners) a couple MM shorter than the two for the middles so I can put some aluminum angle between them and the front panel, and then drill and tap it so that I can screw the wooden sides on. Maybe get some hard rubber sheet about 1/4" thick and sandwich that between the keyboard part of the PCB and whatever I use as a bottom to give it extra support. Probably mount the connectors to a panel on the top like the original, and put a MIDI retrofit in it (but no speaker or batteries). Haven't actually read much of the original thread yet so I didn't see if it already has the filter input mod build in to the design, but if not I'll obviously add that, too. Have to finally finish getting the parts for the Midibox SEQ and finish it, too. Main board has been done for months but I keep spending the money I should put toward getting all the encoders on stuff like this instead. This thing, the Anushri, the x0x and the old MT-32 (for those great/awful drums!) sequenced from the Midibox would be a pretty excellent minimal, portable setup.

I'm going to get some mahogany and make mine into a Jasper Special.

Heads up for the DIYers here: The group order for a third run of the Jasper EDP Wasp clone kit is open over at Muffwiggler. Finally registered and got on the list yesterday, can't wait! Demo of one of the earlier runs:

Yeah, 2016 has been the best year for cheap/free gear I've had since I changed cities about 8 years ago. $50 Korg i30, brand new Porter Case hard case/handtruck from work (fuckers had a $400+ MSRP before they discontinued the model), a few pedals from a guy at work including an early black Russian Big Muff modded with at least dour different diode combinations on a rotary switch (has more than 4 positions but a bunch of them sound the same) and now this, plus a few other things I didn't need and gave to friends. I've got a few 80s cassette decks I found last week waiting to find good homes too (since they aren't good enough to be worth ebaying). I actually jumped out of a slow-moving (like <2 mph) car to get that Wohler though. When you drive by rack gear on the street you do what you've got to do. Lol at the last bit. But really, good luck/good eyes/good city or neighborhoods/etc. I live in a tiny poor town in the south so I see 30 year old furniture and broken home decor on the roadsides. One day, though...it'll be something awesome. That Big Muff sounds pretty fun! There are downside to living in neighborhoods full of college kids who have more money than you do, but their trash is a goldmine.