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 Memories of Tape Is tape dead? As more of us move from reel to reel to computer editing and digital recording, it seems like we have pretty much abandoned the endless rolls of long brown vinyl. Funny thing was, when we asked for tape stories we found that people didn't want to talk about razor blades or those incredibly expensive Edit-All blocks. Instead, they told us of the subtle ways that technology has changed the craft. Dan Malleck - former station manager of CFBU Brock Radio When I arrived at CFBU in 1998, I was horrified to find that there was not a reel to reel in the place. I had used digital recording for years at CFRC, plugging a deck into my own computer at home, but there was nothing quite like the tactile satisfaction of slicing then splicing. I savoured the thrill of getting an edit perfect after carefully listening, back and forth, and marking with that white grease pencil, and slicing clean, and then reconnecting with that cute little slip of editing tape. That feeling will never disappear for me. I tried to convince the staff at CFBU that reel to reel was cool. How portable it was, how cue-able. But they wouldn't go for it. The worst part was, they lacked the "ear" for editing. What with the ubiquitous "undo edit" command, the ability to hear a cue - to anticipate the perfect edit before cutting and pasting - is a lost art. And that ear comes in handy when you're going live to air, or helping someone else edit, or even just showing off ("How'd you do that?!" "I've got the ear!") Call me a nostalgic old fart, but even after almost a year of digital only, there is something vaguely unsatisfying about the digital process. I feel disassociated from my work. Computers make me get in there, do it quick, and get out. There's no jumping from deck to deck making sure they play on time. No razor blades, tape and grease pencil. No high fives when I make the seemingly impossible edit sound seamless. Just a passionless computer screen, a waveform, and a bunch of 23 year old skeptics. Liam Allen - formerly station manager of CHMA, Sackville, NB There are two fond memories that come to mind when I think about Reel to Reel. About 7 years ago, I was working on a sound design for Eugene Ionesco's "Rhinoceros". In the play, the rhinos were representative of Nazi Germany and the mentalities present within a fascist regime. The challenge at hand was in trying to create the beast itself. How does one reflect the qualities of lumbering power in a soundscape? Here's how it all came together in the end. I gathered a group of actors and led them through an improv session where they were the rhinos themselves. I recorded them grazing, walking, engaged in territorial fighting - the whole she-bang. This gave me a good start. I placed that over a tight tape loop of a King Crimson song, but it still wasn't enough. That afternoon I was walking past a large meeting hall where a rehearsal was about to take place. The actors were moving sofas around to accommodate their workspace. I was struck by the sound of the wooden legs scraping, rumbling, and groaning over the parquet floor in this cavernous room. That night I strapped an Otari 50/50 to the couch, plugged in an ambient mike, taped one to the couch itself and began running around the room at breakneck speed. I looped it and layered it and it was perfect. Although the experience was not specific to reel to reel tape, the sight of me prancing about this room pushing a couch and tinkering with this sizable hunk of recording machinery must have been one to see. Likely from a safe distance. As an aside, it has been speculated that the lower frequencies and unique speaker placements of this particular sound cue (under seating with rattling pipes on the cross braces) may have prompted an occasional audience member to remove themselves from the theatre. Victoria Fenner - independent producer and radio trainer - South River Ontario No computer program will ever require me to get down on my hands and knees and pick up every little half inch bit of tape, which in addition to containing that annoying "um" I cut out, also contains the first syllable of the word I don't want to cut out. And then taping together all the 1" bits to find the missing piece, and then shaving off the precise 2 mm. of tape that is needed without getting the "um". Without having the 2 mm. accidentally getting wedged in the crack in the editing block. Or splicing in a piece of tape only to find I spliced it in backwards. Glupr, nyork, eh blurpnyerp... David Kattenburg - Independent Producer - Earth Chronicle Productions Radio is about voices. Seem obvious? In the course of editing digitally, doing things I could never do with a razor blade and my Studer Revox, I am rediscovering the human voice as radio art. I have undertaken to master The Earth Chronicles, a series of 32 audio documentaries I created together with Peter Hutton, onto CD. In the basement studio of Earth Chronicle Productions, an hour's drive from the Saskatchewan border, I am listening once more to voices originally laid down on brown, quarter-inch tape, on a Nagra III (mono), in the course of travels back and forth across Canada between 1992 and 94. Here are the voices I first heard in living rooms and offices, in forests and automobiles, on beaches, boats and ferries, from the north shore of the St. Lawrence out to the west coast of Wickaninnish Island, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Sitting in my basement, I recall the hours I spent recording these voices, meeting the people behind them. They were hospitable men and women - in northern Ontario, the Eastern Townships of Quebec, the Georgia Strait, the Turtle Mountains of southwest Manitoba, the Rocky Mountain foothills, the Bay of Fundy. Our first contact was by post or telephone. They would put me up, feed me, lend me their automobile. They would spend a few hours or days with me - a strange kind of guy, but pleasant - showing me places they found so special, that they wanted to protect. Soon they would forget me. I would go home and spend months with them in my room in Hamilton, listening to their voice again and again, cutting it up with a razor blade, a length of quarter-inch tape over each shoulder, perhaps, or around my neck; stretches and scraps of tape on the desk beside me; long loops rolled up on the floor. The voices I had recorded were crisp, bright, rich, passionate. I became familiar with their tone and cadence. Listening again and again to the rumble in their chest or the smile on their lips, I imagined that I knew these people intimately. They were the closest of friends. Now, listening to them once more in the basement studio of Earth Chronicle Productions, it is as if I am engaged in forensics. I edit their words with a mouse. I search for silent gaps to cut and paste. With the sweep of my wrist and click of my finger, I methodically search out and eliminate soft sighs, wheezy inhalations and saliva pops. I discover bad edits - often as trivial as a silent gap between adjacent backround noise beds - and I fix them. I find the precise point - quite literally, the precise point - where a person's voice begins, and I meld it to the one previous. I zoom in on these voices in Cool Edit, down to the sine wave itself, scrutinizing them in intimate detail, like bits of ancient manuscript in a modern lab. As I point and probe, I recall how I edited these voices for the first time - rocking open palms, in decreasing swings back and forth, back and forth; a turn of the head, a lowering of the ear; stroke of wax pencil and razor blade; carefully tape and press. Where in this wave form are the blade and tape? Where is the softness in a syllable or the passion in a person's voice? Can it be distilled? I don't know. The indecipherable essence of the human voice is what makes radio so much fun for me. When I stand back and listen to these voices, digitally polished now, I feel a great desire to go out with my Nagra and start all over again. Dave Seglins - CBC News, Toronto One of my 'tape-editor' tasks at rant radio CFRB 1010 in Toronto was to dice and slice the so-called "week's best" interviews into several, full, hour-long reels. Scores of snippets, spliced into stretches of tape. Without fail, it meant a ritual that left me pock marked with grease pencil, fingers sticky with splicing tape, and bits of tape under my nails. Inevitably, I'd spend hours unraveling, losing, dropping, erasing endless 'vital pieces' of tape, hanging off my left shoulder, another over the right, a few taped to the wall? one dropped into the garbage can. Ahhh? the good old days of quarter-inch tape. Good riddance! Copyright CSIRP 2001 Copyright for materials on this website is the property of the content creators and the Canadian Society for Independent Radio Production, unless otherwise noted. Materials may be freely used by non-profit organizations and educational institutions for non-commercial purposes only. For evaluation purposes, CSIRP would appreciate it if you would let us know how you have used these materials, and in what context. Material reproduced from this website must include the CSIRP logo, website address and this message. |
