THE MILL REPORT: FUTURE REWIND

Sometimes the outcomes haven’t sounded so great. In a couple of cases in particular there have been maintenance issues with the machines that engineers haven’t picked up on, perhaps blinded in some cases by the romance and novelty of the tracking method. In the same way that some engineers can get blinded by new technology, others it seems are easily blinded by the old.

This year, without doubt, there’s been a small push to reclaim a tone to which analogue tape was fundamental. Whether this resurgence gains much more momentum in coming months or years as the reality of what’s involved in the maintenance of tape machines hits home, only time will tell.

TAKE THREE

I’m a bit on the fence with this resurgence myself. As much as I love the sound of a good analogue tape multitrack recording, I’ve spent vast numbers of hours over two or three decades living with, managing, and in some cases fighting the format. I know its strengths and weaknesses all too well, and I’m concerned…

Not for the musical outcomes so much; I’m sure there will be some interesting stuff produced and discovered by people who’ve not worked with a medium that’s bound by so many physical constraints. (A good sounding format like tape, which limits your capacity

for endless overdubbing and 20 playlists for every track can be liberating!)

No, my concern is that there’s a lot forgotten about the format, and much that’s attributed to the ‘sound of tape’ that, in fact, had very little or nothing to do with it.

The complexity of the analogue chains, the sounds of the rooms where recordings took place, and the abilities of the performers themselves for instance are often grossly overlooked and understated by those who like to romanticise the tape-based recording era as if there was nothing more to the process. You could be forgiven – based on what some people say about it – for thinking that all you had to do back in the day was roll tape and the rest took care of itself.

I hate it when people rewrite history like that.

Tape was a costly, limited and high-maintenance format. It wowed, it fluttered, it distorted and occasionally broke. It was other things too of course. It was great sounding (if you had a decent, well maintained machine). It was good at adding ‘red-light pressure’, forcing performers to step up and get the job done, knowing that the moment tape rolled it was make or break. Ironically to me now, tape was also liberating (back in the ’80s 24 tracks seemed to offer a huge capacity for songs to be fully realised. Two 24-tracks sync’d together… limitless options!

Now 24-track seems tiny.

But please, let’s not talk about tape like it’s some sort of modern panacea for ridding the world of everything that’s bad about music. I’ve heard that one before! It’s garbage.

And let’s not resuscitate the tedious analogue-versus-digital debate again please… I don’t think I could survive another round of that circular discussion.