Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Share your favorite Ableton Live tips, tricks, and techniques.
michaellpenman
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by michaellpenman » Thu Jun 11, 2009 3:56 pm

I normally bounce all my track to tape, but the best this to do is to bounce out a 2 track master and slighty saturate the signal.
If you master second you will bring up the noise floor by compressing.

Ok send me a private message and we can discuss it there.

kgavrilov
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by kgavrilov » Sat Jun 13, 2009 5:22 pm

And What about this.You have say your drum channels grouped,and you record them a couple of times on cassette than bring them back to Live,warp them and instead of Paralell Compression you mix 20% of the analog sound with the dry digital sound.The benefit of doing that is that you have really fat drum parts.Maybe im crazy dunno!

http://www.myspace.com/kaloyangavrilov :arrow:

hurlingdervish
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by hurlingdervish » Sat Jun 13, 2009 7:50 pm

what are you guys doing to boost the signal?

im running through a dj mixer, but it gets distorted on the mixer before it reaches the tape. i like the sound of this, ive chopped up some nice hits, and nice saturated snares, but it would be nice to be able to run whole tracks through without making it too distorted

michaellpenman
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by michaellpenman » Sun Jun 14, 2009 3:35 am

kgavrilov wrote:And What about this.You have say your drum channels grouped,and you record them a couple of times on cassette than bring them back to Live,warp them and instead of Paralell Compression you mix 20% of the analog sound with the dry digital sound.The benefit of doing that is that you have really fat drum parts.Maybe im crazy dunno!

http://www.myspace.com/kaloyangavrilov :arrow:

OOOOH i love this

you one thing i do is bounce my drums out at 8bit and layer them under the normal version.

The way to know if something works is to say does it sound good and if the answer is yes then it does.

michaellpenman
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by michaellpenman » Sun Jun 14, 2009 3:40 am

hurlingdervish wrote:what are you guys doing to boost the signal?

im running through a dj mixer, but it gets distorted on the mixer before it reaches the tape. i like the sound of this, ive chopped up some nice hits, and nice saturated snares, but it would be nice to be able to run whole tracks through without making it too distorted

You need to correct your gain stages. Sound like you are clipping either the i/ps or the o/ps.
Ableton o/p sound be bellow 0dB Not clipping, Then on tape send the signal to the red.
Record it.
When sending back to ableton make sure to lower the level so it does not clip.

So if you are coming from ableton going back to ableton as a effect loop maybe use the external FX plugin.

Also a thing to note is that yes you can run a signal into the red on a analog system and it sound beefy and crunchy but if you do the same to a digital i/p you will get that nasty digital hard clipping.

hurlingdervish
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by hurlingdervish » Sun Jun 14, 2009 2:18 pm

that really didnt answer my question...

ableton isnt clipping

its boosting the signal outside of ableton in order to get an actual sound on the tape that makes it clip

LesPasta
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by LesPasta » Sun Jun 14, 2009 5:46 pm

501kuts wrote:yeah , i bounce back to a VCR and bounce back, it gives it that tru analog sound and then i bounce it back to cool edit pro and dither it in there to conver it to MP3s, not to mention it fattens up your sound!!!!!

do you know about frequency range and tape ? I've been told that you lose so much bandwidth recording to cassettes that it isnt worthwhile... how about VHS ?

If you know the numbers please let me know.

also. are you recording your stereo mix onto vhs ? or just 'warming up' samples, loops etc ?

i think i want to break out my portastudio !

www.myspace.com/lespasta

michaellpenman
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by michaellpenman » Sun Jun 14, 2009 6:24 pm

hurlingdervish wrote:that really didnt answer my question...

ableton isnt clipping

its boosting the signal outside of ableton in order to get an actual sound on the tape that makes it clip


I did tell you to check your gain stages.
Which is ableton o/p
soundcards gain o/p
mixer trim or pre and fader
tape machine i/p
tape fader etc

But as i said as well when recording onto a analog medium its ok and sometimes good to clip. This is where you get coloration.
You just have to make sure not to clip into ableton which is digital

phonographiq
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by phonographiq » Sun Sep 25, 2011 8:39 am

I'd just like to say
this has been a thrilling idea.

I mean a VCR for chrissake, who would've thought.
rhythmic surrealism / philadelphia / $$$
http://soundcloud.com/phonographiq

fmacor
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Re: Bouncing Your Mixdown to Cassette or reel to reel..anyone!?!

Post by fmacor » Mon Oct 03, 2011 2:29 pm

I used to bounce tracks to a TANDBERG TD20A at 15ips.
Now i find a better solution using a SPL Machine Head and a Roland RE 501

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