Anyone who knows me knows of my love for esoteric and obscure recording practices such as using antiquated tape machines to record, and my colleague LB was no different. So when he heard I was setting up commercial studio number 2 in the basement of my residential house, he kindly offered to loan me his Ampex MM1200 24 track 2in machine, aka “Analogue Warrior”. Hence the previous slogan “a digital studio with an analogue heart”.
Now, before we get too nostalgic about the “good old days”, the machine was an absolute pain to keep working, as all vintage tape machines are. However, it was worth the pain of getting it up and running when it did work. Here’s a track we recorded on it:
This vintage-sounding Blues recording almost didn’t happen because, like all seventies tape machines, it almost didn’t fit into the control room:
We had to take the middle out of the door frame to get it into the room. This happened several times over the years, as it went off for repairs and returned. The thing about this machine is that it is very, very resilient, you could hot swap the cards to get a number of the middle channels working.
Ultimately it became BER (Beyond Economical Repair - for the uninitiated) and went off to a new home with a fellow analogue geek enthusiast who had the means and skills to keep it running and, as far as I’m aware, it is still in operation to this day!
I still love tape machines, but only when recording other artists, the workflow quickly puts me into a flow state. However, I prefer a rapid, digital workflow when recording my material, where getting down ideas is more important than aesthetics, at least initially.