I’m curious as to how many of you have down tracks totally in analog, and if you had any cool stories to share, or stories about what a bitch it is.
We recorded our old cover band practicing one time by putting a boom box in the bedroom next to the den (aka rehearsal space) and closing the door. It turned out way better sounding than we expected. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to recording analog.
1 Like
I started out on a Fostex X-15, one of the first consumer products for multi-track recording (about 1983). It used regular cassette tapes but bypassed the tape governor to use all 4 tracks in one direction. Now that’s not nearly as intricate as 2" tape machine monsters, but it WAS analog. 
I did a lot of tape bouncing to get more tracks, and had to deal with the tape tone degradation from that. Bias high-end rolloff, whatever. It was painful when you consider that now with digital you can lay down a loop in a short time and copy it 100x with a keyboard shortcut, not to mention no signal degradation.
One of the few times I experienced full studio 2" tape was doing some tracks for a cover of “Still of the Night”. I went to a pro studio to lay down the drum tracks but did all the rest in my “home studio” (which was just that little tape deck and cheap microphones 
).
1 Like
Dude, I need to hear that cover. The original album version sounds like shit, so you don’t have to compete with much. Great song, the production is ass.
The only analog experience I have is on the old four track, and I supplemented those recordings with digital effects and samples many years after the fact. Mostly that NSFW spoken word stuff.
A friend of mine was an engineer at a studio in Detroit, and we had the opportunity to cut a few songs after hours. This was before automation, so sometimes you’d have two or three guys operating faders at the same time on the board. Watching someone edit and actually cut a two inch tape and splice it together perfectly was a trip. It was also fun to do backwards stuff, since it required you to reverse the reel and play normal to the backwards tracks, and then re-flip it and see how you did. This place had a great monitoring system. When you walked out into the room and then back to the board, it was identical essentially. You couldn’t pull off all the tricks you can do now on a basic DAW, simply because comps, eq, limiters, etc. were all hardware, so you really needed to get what you wanted into the mic in the first place.
1 Like
Would I be correct in assuming it was a Kiss cover band?
Have you digitized the tape? I’d love to hear what the results were.
Well, my production was 1/100th of theirs, including the budget. Basically “stone knives and bearskins”. 
And I was doing all the parts, most of the recording, and then the mixing (such as were my self-taught skills at the time). I did spend quite a bit of time practicing the parts though.
CAVEATS!: This was about 1987 (file says 1985 but I know it was later), which is 30 years ago, and pretty early in my performing and recording career. I really loved the song and their version of it.
My guitar skills were decent at the time I think, I could play bass, and I’m actually pretty impressed with the vocals I did considering I had never done anything quite like that before (unless you count singing along with Rob Halford on Hell Bent for Leather). I had no singing or vocal training at that point, it was all self taught and emulated from artists I admired.
My only reverb was a cheap Realistic (Radio Shack) unit that was pretty horrible but I did some amazing things with it considering the cost and technology at the time. My microphone was also a cheap Realistic electret condenser mic. The drums I did play in the “big studio” (their kit) and they recorded me along with the tracks I already had recorded on cassette. I had been a drummer for some years, but was rusty at that point having sold my kit 5 years before - so not too bad in that perspective. Keyboard was a cheap Casio that I had which included drum pads/drum machine which I used on most other songs I wrote and recorded.
OK, enough qualifying the quality 
… “Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a warm round of applause for Stan_Halen performing Whitesnake!”
.
1 Like
For certain since the Whitesnake album is called and was released in 1987. Nice falsetto, you sound like the Bee Gees. Lacking in power, but you’re in key.
Did anyone else do this song? I know Coverdale and Sykes wrote it together. Funny enough my copy of 1987 has a SPARS code of DDD, indicating that the Whitesnake album an all digital recording, in the analog topic.
That’s true. John Syke’s guitar sound on that album and Blue Murder is what I imagine it would sound like if he stuck the speaker up his ass and then played and recorded underwater.
I wish I’d have known you when you did those. They’re a lot of fun. Would have loved to have been part of one.
1 Like
Fuck yeah, Stan. I had a Casio too. Cool cover. What’s sad about Whitesnake is that they probably spent more money on that than the entire UK GDP and it still sounds awful. Is it digital? My American CD, which is just self-titled has one of those warnings on the back saying “Beware recorded using analog, may reveal limitations of the source tape because CD rulez.”
1 Like
Thanks! Yeah I was going to mention that … the only way I could hit those high notes at the time was to do falsetto, and I probably didn’t even know what falsetto was (or meant) back then, just trying to sound like David Coverdale as best I could.
Wow, that was pretty early for DDD. Billy Joel and Queen had tinkered with it because they had the budgets and the curiosity. But I know mine was analog, well, until I had the ‘master’ tapes bounced to CD and then ripped them to MP3.
Thank you!
1 Like
Keith Olsen (Whitesnake producer) is the jerk who opened an all digital studio next to Sound City (famous analog studio, there’s a great movie about it) and put it out of business even though he used to work there. They were using Sony 24 track machines for digital back then, Whitesnake could be digital. I mean, Turbo by Priest came out in 1986 is all digital, so is their 1987 live album. Hell my Peter Gabriel 4 CD was made in West Germany in 1984 and the recording itself was all digital from 1982. Incredible.
Oh yeah, I remember that part in the movie.
I guess technically they were digital, but if they were digital tape does that make a difference? I kind of figured that was a hybrid compared to what we have now. Maybe not.
I mean I thought they were still recording with 1s and 0s, it’s just that those 1s and 0s were being stored on tape. I know they were 16-bit, and had two sampling rate choices, 44.1 and 48 kHz. You still get all the fragility of tape, but there was no high-end loss from bouncing or playing it over and over.
1 Like
If I can find it, I’ll slap it up here.
1 Like
I bet it has Style, Bitchley.
Nope. I’ve only been in one “one off” KISS cover band.