When I bought a Royer R-121, I added to my arsenal what is widely regarded as the best microphone for electric guitar of all-time.

When I acquired my API preamps, I gained the coloration found on an endless number of classic recordings from the past fourty years.

When I assembled my new PC, an Intel i7-950 with 12GB of DDR3, I was no longer limited by my computer and the sky became the limit.

But one thing still nagged me. With all of my high-tech gear, I was missing one integral piece of a professional studio: tape. The harshness of digital recording is like a shotgun to my eardrum and no matter what I do, that cold shrillness of something sounding through my monitors the way it actually sounds when standing in front of it makes my blood boil.

So I fixed it.

I would like to introduce you to a piece of classic gear. An item that has been owned by countless classic producers, an item integral to the history of recording. Friends, I would like to introduce…

The Tascam Porta02. No balanced connections, no phantom power, no bullshit. Just right.

OK, so with that out of the way, I’d like to say how much the whole attitude of “tape, good; digital, baaaad” bugs me. I can’t begin to tell you how often I hear or read someone remark, “Oh yeah, we’re recording here. He uses all analog shit, man. It’s fuckin’ great,” or, “You record digitally? That’s cool but tape is just so much better.” Seriously, shut up. Just shut up.

The notion of tape being better than digital recording comes from a few places, as far as I’m concerned. Here they are.

One, home recording has fucked up recorded music. While it is a wonderful equalizer and allows young bands and individuals the ability to record and share their music, the accessibility of cheap gear and guys who setup their Digi 002 and suddenly have a studio causes a real problem for guys who invest thousands in their setup. Well, maybe not a “real” problem but it is an inconvenience and frustrating when good bands sell themselves short by going with cheap instead of good… but that’s another story. Anyway, the point is that because of the cheap AD converters you find floating around, my generation thinks that is what a digital recording sounds like, doesn’t really consider the whole AD/DA process, and don’t stop to think that just as there are different grades of guitars and drums and cars and phones and dogs and fucking people there must be different grades of analog-to-digital converters and tape machines. Those of us who come from the DIY scenes and grew up listening to noisy, shitty recordings discovered vinyl and realized that it made all that noise at the top and bottom feel much softer, so it’s easy to follow the logic that says that if vinyl is better than CD (which also pisses me off) than tape must be better than digital.

Second, tape has this coolness to it that it gets just by being old, slow, and cumbersome. It’s also expensive, which helps too. It’s also becoming more of a rarity. Bonus! We want what nobody else is doing.

Third, tape really CAN sound better. In some cases. Allow me to educate, studio-shopping friends.

First of all, in the right circumstances, tape is awesome. All tape colors sound in a unique way. It also does interesting things to dynamics. If you hit tape hard enough, you get natural compression that is incredible. You get warmth and punch, shrill highs are softened, lows fill out. There is a vibrancy and fullness that is instantly recognizable as coming from tape that is impossible to get in a PC unless you are using the UAD Studer plug-in (which is debatable) or the Nebula R2R library combined with the same developer’s TB+ and VTM-M2 which, by nearly all accounts, does a flawless job of making signals passed through it sound identical to what it would be if sent through the actual hardware. It is amazing. But that’s not my point here.

What is my point is that like anything else, there are different grades of tape and there are different grades of tape machines. What many musicians and uneducated studio engineers do not seem to realize is that a cheap tape machine, while having a sound that might be worth using in some cases, is going to sound cheap and shitty. If you don’t keep it maintained — if you don’t keep ANY tape machine maintained — it will sound worse and worse over time. Additionally, the actual tape you use is going to affect the end result. I’m no expert on tape machines or tape brands, but I can tell you that if you are looking for a place to record and you really want to use tape, you need to find out the model of the machine, what kind of maintenance is performed, and what kind of tape they’re using. Research the gear, get samples of their previous work, and listen carefully to it. After that, find out what they do after it’s on the tape and if they mix 100% in the analog world or if it at any time goes into a computer. Because if it goes into a computer…

…digital recording is not the same everywhere you go. The analog-to-digital process is not universal and your $500 converter is not going to sound the same as your Lynx Aurora. Same mics, same cables, same preamps, same room, same instruments, and your recordings will sound different. It might be subtle, the kind of thing you don’t notice when soloing tracks, but it’s usually easiest to pick out in the stereo image and extreme high and low frequencies and something that is noticeable when listening to a full band recorded using cheap AD compared to expensive AD. Cheap conversion is one of the hallmarks of a hastily-assembled studio. The guy with the killer mics into the OK preamps using shitty cables into low-end converters and then coming back through entry-level monitors: that’s someone who needs to read more. But he is everywhere.

So what I see happening way more often than I’d like is this: good band is attracted by a studio’s analog gear. They go and record there and the guy is using a tape machine but… it sounds kind of crappy, kind of… weird. But because the band has been telling themselves and been told that old = good and vintage = cool and lo-fi = awesome, they’re all afraid to say, “Hey, wait, my $2000 guitar played through my $2000 head into my $1200 cab doesn’t sound the way it does when you’re standing in front of it.” The Emperor’s New Clothes: audio engineering edition. Then, to make matters worse, the studio just uses the tape for that “vintage warmth” and then they dump it into their PC to edit it by sending it through their Digi 002. Hell, even if they use a killer Studer tape machine, as soon as they send it through those cheap preamps and that cheap converter, their quality immediately decreases. But if anyone notices, they don’t want to say anything.

Like tape machines, you can spent tens of thousands of dollars on AD conversion. The catchall “digital recording” is unfair to those who invest in Mytek gear, just as calling my Tascam Porta 02 “vintage tape” is an insult to those whose carefully maintained Otari machines are the pride of their studios. My point here: know what you’re looking for, know what you’re getting. The idea that digital recording is inherently cold and brittle is just as absurd as the idea that all tape is warm and punchy.

With Harold Camping and Friends’ PR stunt coming to a close in fewer than 24 hours, the project has generated the buzz we can only assume he hoped for. The internet is on fire with conversation, Facebook might as well be the Official Doomsday Discussion Forum, CNN has it on the front page, many of the top websites found by searching “May 21” are inaccessible as a result of increased traffic. I had dinner tonight with my parents — I haven’t seen them for months — and the absurdity and irresponsibility of those involved with this stunt was the big topic of conversation. We, the non-believers, are getting a good laugh, a well-deserved sense of superiority, mocking or maybe feeling some sort of pity for those who destroyed their lives because someone told them that nothing would matter past this Saturday. We are shocked, confused, maybe even a little nervous about the fact that these people went to such lengths to support something so completely ridiculous. Thankfully, they will soon go away and we can get back to life as normal. Right? No.

Harold Camping and his cult are fascinating but this level of blind faith can be found within millions of Americans. The only difference between the people who are excited for the Rapture tomorrow and those who know without a doubt that the world was created in seven 24-hour days is that Camping’s people have picked a specific date while everyone else is just kind of waiting around. When this doomsday cult fades away, the more sinister cult, the one with better funding, better organization, better PR media, and influence over school boards and every level of government will still be there, plotting and working towards their goals. These people have a freaking theme park, for crying out loud — a brainwashing machine aimed at children, slick and polished, all to reinforce the idea that the Bible is the word of God, evolution is wrong, the world is only a few thousand years old, and secular society is sick and evil. Given the opportunity, they would have us submit, despite the fact that irrefutable science is against them. I am not saying that everyone who interprets the Bible literally is a political activist bent on subverting our secular world; I am, however, saying that there is a huge movement of those who are.

I hope this media circus reminds everyone of just how crazy religion makes some people. As this fades away, try to remember that the same blind faith that fueled this doomsday cult fuels another doomsday cult, one that can’t predict the end so it’s content with simply taking over. Be aware, talk about what it means to you, get organized, and actively reject Christian extremism wherever it is found.

Immolith began recording their new full-length yesterday. They came by Friday to load in and do scratch guitars to a click so Saturday, we were able to get drum sounds and go.

I can’t begin to express how happy it makes me when bands record to a click. The whole process is faster, smoother, and the end result is tighter.

This is my first session with the new preamp. It’s cool but I ended up using sending snare top through the Pre 73 and that fourth API channel sort of ended up not mattering. That isn’t to say that the bottom snare (which went through the VP26) doesn’t matter but I don’t think the world would have ended if it had gone through the board. Oh well. An extra channel can’t hurt.

We’re finishing up guitars right now. I’m amazed at what the Carnhill transformer did to the Pre 73. I never quite understood how people used a single 57 for distorted guitar until now, though the R-121 still adds quite a bit of body to the sound and I wouldn’t give it up for the world.

Something exciting happened yesterday: I found a potential new apartment and studio space not far from where I live now. I don’t really want to say much about it beyond that but it is very promising!

That’s it for now. Back to unholy black metal with Immolith!

Picked up another API 312 pre the other night, bringing me to three racked by OSA and one killer clone/upgrade in the form of a VP26. Combined with the modded GAP Pre 73, I have four channels of API and one Neve-ish, giving me five killer, killer channels for drums. Overheads through BLA Auteur. I need to pay off some bills so it’ll be a few weeks before I get anything new and substantial but I have some cool stuff coming up.

Immolith begin recording their full-length this weekend. Gonna be awesome. More news soon.

OK, Microsoft. What the hell?

A random Exchange 2010 service, in this case the Microsoft Exchange Address Book (MSExchangeAB), simply failed to start after a reboot. No errors in any logs, it just timed out. No troubleshooting information anywhere online. I thought about it a little and popped open the microsoft.exchange.addressbook.service.exe.config file and what did I find? This at the end:

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This is the exact same issue that has happened with another client’s Hyper-V Server, though there, an XML configuration file belonging to a Hyper-V VM is the being corrupted and disappearing from the Hyper-V console as a result. It happened to them twice and we were never able to find out why. I doubt I’ll ever find out why this just happened but I sure wish I could get the last two hours of my life back.