Slate Digital Virtual Tape Machines Plug-In

[Geoff Grace]

According to at least a couple of engineers I know who worked on hip hop records during the nineties, the pinning the meters technique was pretty popular in some of those circles. Both of them complained about it, but that's the way it was.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Lee Knight]

What the recording community really needs is a

[rasputin1963]

While suckers are not in short supply, there is no shortage of watchdogs desperately trying to protect the common masses from themselves. I'm not sure I'm confident in their assessment of what "the recording community really needs".

 

Our current era must be something akin to when Gutenburg's printing press was invented. Suddenly, every shmoe across the land could own and read The Bible, not just priests and bigwigs in big cities. I'll bet your Irish Celtic page illuminators hated some of the crap that was mass-printed instead of the stuff THEY did that was painstakingly done by hand.

 

Painter Edward Hopper was one of the first painters to depict scenes under fluorescent lighting. He said, "every generation has their kind of light".

 

 

 

 

My biggest beef, I suppose with our current musical zeitgeist is the unquestioned assumption that no-one need study music anymore. There's no amount of electronic wizardry/circuitry that can replace a knowledge of music, not really. Even KRAFTWERK's AUTOBAHN is very rich in (traditional) musical understanding, as I recently appreciated upon a re-listen.

 

The European Art Nouveau artists of the late 1800's hated what they considered to be crappy mass production of art. They decided they were going to be the new purists who would lovingly return naturalism, craftsmanship, individuality, human-centered values to popular art. So... go figure that, in time, the most celebrated exemplars of Art Nouveau, like Alphonse Mucha, would become most well-known for their lithographed posters, mass-printed and slapped onto every alley-wall in Paris. It's mass produced crap... that we now treasure as incomparable works of art. (-;

 

[UstadKhanAli]

My biggest beef, I suppose with our current musical zeitgeist is the unquestioned assumption that no-one need study music anymore.

Yup.

 

 

There's no amount of electronic wizardry/circuitry that can replace a knowledge of music, not really.

I've been saying for years now:

the greatest thing about music now is that everyone can make recordings.

The worst thing about music now is that everyone can make recordings.

 

 

 

Even KRAFTWERK's AUTOBAHN is very rich in (traditional) musical understanding, as I recently appreciated upon a re-listen.

 

I've been listening to their first few releases, where they played flute, bass, acoustic drums, and really like it as well.

[MikeRivers]

Well, they could always program the plug-in to stop working at a random time, flash a message on the screen saying "capstan motor fail," and you have to send them $400 before it will work again. That would come closer to emulating the experience

 

Awww, Craig - I know you're trying to be cute, but tape decks aren't designed to fail, but they're mechanical and electrical and occasionally things need maintenance or repair. It's the same with computer. The difference is that with computers, you can't always easily determine the problem, and you can't always fix it in a way that you know it's fixed.

 

A real tape deck works with anything you connect to it, or if it doesn't it's easy to figure out why. If you change the console, you may need different cables or a better understanding of operating levels, but that's about it. If it works a little differently when you change brands of tape, a simple adjustment will bring it back into spec. But if you do an operating system or DAw program update and your plug-in stops working, it's time to call Ghostbusters. And if you change computer platforms, you may need to buy a new plug-in.

 

But my real point is that tape recorder manufacturers always strove for transparency. We know that they never quite achieve that, and that creative recordists have learned to take advantage of the distortion that comes along with analog recording. But at the end of the day, the plug-in isn't simulating a recorder, it's simulating certain types of distortion that are present in tape decks, and other pieces of analog audio electronics.

 

Tape decks don't even simulate other tape decks. That's why these plug-ins offer so many choices.

[BushmasterM4]

Yes, that