For The Record: Analog Mixing

In the 1980's and 1990's I had a 16-track 1" Teac 85-16 with a Teac M15 16 inputs, 16 monitoring, and 8 buss mixing board and I loved recording bands, mixing to a Tascam 32-2. Splicing became an art to learn. Recording in analog is an art and maintaining a multi-track tape machine was a full-time adventure, cleaning the heads with alcohol, and aligning a tape with a calibration alignment tape which cost $1000 to make sure that everything was working correctly. I remember taking my mixing board apart and cleaning every channel, every button, and every switch, it took almost 12 hours to complete, but my board was clean as a whistle. Setting up patch bays for all the external processing and the miles of wires required to make a system work while not having any noise was a challenge and to a certain degree, I miss the magic of analog. I now work in Pro Tools and it is a lot easier to get things done but recording in analog was a true craft and a lost art that is slowly disappearing. Jonny Rock & Friends, you have done a fantastic job keeping an analog studio still running. Great Job!!!.

I found this video in my search to understand analog recording. Great explanation on how it works. I have huge respect for those who splice the tape to make the edits.

I love your passion, man!

Love it! I switched over to all analogue a number of years ago and all of this sounds familiar. The Otari machines are really nice. I have a Stephens 821b and Ampex 440c, Soundcraft 2400 with the balanced option but broken automation so my mixes are also manual. I’ve gotten better at this with practice but now really enjoy working in the analogue world.

Thank you for sharing this video

Ok, I had this and other two videos in my watch later since another YouTuber recommended your videos, since I find really interesting the music production and all the processing. I’ve started listening the album today and it’s amazing! Love it. Thank you.

hey, man, i loved everything about this video, is there a way to contact you?

Cool video

Ken Scott mixed Supertramp's Crime of the Century album in 2 or 4-bar sections and when all the bits were mixed, he spliced the entire album together. In 1972 there wasn't mix automation, so you either made the adjustments "on the fly" or mixed a song in small sections. The art of tape splice is an art that recording engineers should learn, if you can edit tape, editing in digital is a breeze!

Interesting...

Hey, Johnny! While mastering, what EQ did you use for 2track, before the master tape and cutting to record?

HI I HAVE the mtr12 s well i will say they are evil super to work with very hard to find now i have 3 otari decks all the big one take up alot of space i have a 1/8 reel to reel as well for cassettes record on the the pancakes far better to do it this way never use cassette decks to make cassettes as heads will wear to fast the 1/8 tape is very thin you need to play with the tenson on the otari mtr 12 i have a set of rollers and heads i had made this how they make 1/8 line up cassettes

Nothing great comes easy, it's an art! I guess that's why analogue sounds miles above digital (ONLY IN MY OPINION)! I know your not "allowed" to give an opinion that differs from the "popular opinion"!