I have a very limited knowledge of recording, but the miracle of being able to capture sounds on magnetic tape and the miracle of electricity, and these little magnetic particles, is amazing to me.
The very first thing I ever did, I was doing some work for the French Cultural Center. They wanted a little recording set up. And I got wire. A wire recorder. The wire came off spools, and to cut and edit, you tied it together in little square knots. Can you imagine?
When I was really young, I was using VHS tapes to record.
Yeah, you know, I'm always into cassette. At least they seem to be the longest-lasting medium we used to have. I don't play cassettes much anymore, but I play records all the time.
I was going to tape some records onto a cassette, but I got the wires backwards. I erased the all of the records. When I returned them to my friend, he said, "Hey, these records are all blank."
Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.
That's what records do: represent a compressed, heightened version of the sound. Because of the compression of the tubes and microphones and the wax, it's magic!
When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.
Many companies at the 2013 NAB show were showing LTO tape archiving technology. The LTO Consortium had a popular exhibit at the 2013 NAB promoting the new LTO 6 tape standard.
Nothing could be recorded in those days except by aiming a movie camera at the television screen. It was at least another 10 years before they had any kind of recording medium.
People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.
Every record I've ever done with Tool has been on tape.
I don't like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time, when I'm recording to two-inch tape, I still have a romantic vision of how songs sounded coming out of the radio when I was younger, and how they sounded coming out of my little four-track cassette player.
When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.
Well, I'm a tape-recording nut. I like to play my tapes.
It's - as opposed to tape where you have a magnetic tape that's excited by frequencies that you hit, digital was a process where musical sounds are transferred to numbers and stored as numbers.
All I know is that when I mix to digital and when I mix to tape I compare them and the tape always wins out.
