MindTheGap
181 posts
Jan 25, 2014
12:04 AM
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I watched an excellent and strange film 'Berberian Sound Studio' which is about an English sound engineer getting out of his depth while making a horror film in Italy in the 1970s. Most of the action takes place in the claustrophobic atmosphere of his studio where he is surrounded by lovely 70s kit, analogue filters, Revox tape recorders, tape loops running round coffee cups, etc...
One of the effects he uses is a WEM Copicat tape delay. When I was playing guitar as a youth, it was on the cusp of analogue-digital. I fondly remember these machines, it was the way to get long delay effects. They were the supposed to be the affordable version of an otherwise out-of-reach studio effect. So, is anybody still using these things?
What I didn't know at the time was how many different models there were, valve, transistor, different head configurations etc.
Maybe it's just an age thing, but there does seem to be something magical to me about tape. Maybe modern digital 'analogue-style' delays capture the sound perfectly, I don't know.
I'm a fan of Holger Czukay, and in particular the early tape-based sampling and looping. There is definitely an organic quality to this which I'm sure comes from using tape. Digitial sampling and looping may be cheaper, simpler, more accurate and more accessible but while something is found, something is lost.
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Last Edited by MindTheGap on Jan 25, 2014 12:06 AM
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