Half Speed Mastering from Tape
``Please be aware that in all of this, your equalization will be incorrect.''
Also the pre and post echo inherent in all tape WILL drive you crazy
especially passed through such a low filter as 44.1 or 88.2.
Here at the Archives we tape at 192/32 unless we are dealing with session masters.
Half-speeded audiophile LPs work good though if you tape them into a Power Mac for Media
at say 192/32, and then declick and dehiss in an audio restoration prrogram like Diamond Cut Pro
like we use here at the Archives.
Session masters however are played real-time and recorded into the computer
at 13.75 MHz video rate and sent to Jaime
Www.plangentprocesses.com to get
Plangentized i e have the original bias frequency resolved out and all the tape flutter
and wow removed as a result.
However this only works with session tapes which have at least one originally-recorded track.
As probably a lot of you know, a lot of the labels are trying to remix for 5.1 or 7.1 from
half-inch tape recorded in the 50's and 60's. So a lot of the time, the first reel of half
inch 3 track was for orchestra.
Mix that to mono and lay it on a 2nd reel. Lay in your 2 tracks of background singers
or supplemental players.
Mix those to mono and lay that onto a 3rd tape with the 2nd generation mono mix orchestra
and use the third track on the third reel for your lead vocal or your featured player.
So if you work for a firm that reassembles all those original stems to remix for 5.1 etc
all three reels with no timecode all have to lock up in sync.
Fortunately all tape has a constant frequency bias recorded along with the music.
So you can extract the 3 original stereo orchestra tracks from the first reel,
the 2 tracks of background singers or added sidemen from the 2nd reel
and the leadman or vocalist from the 3rd reel.
Jaime can lock all that up in sync with itself and it's almost like having one 1-inch 8-track
master with all the tracks lined up instead of how it is: 3 reels of half inch not synched up.
Yes it's many thousands of dollars an hour for Jaime's time and sync artistry.
But when your engineer gets 300.00 an hour for digital audio workstation processing
and it takes weeks and weeks for him to line it all up by hand, it's worth it.
Hope this is informative.