Electrical Audio How-To: Editing a Stereo Master Tape

[@JohnMorris-ge6hq]

To show you how good engineers were at editing tape back in the 70's, The Who's 1973 album, "Quadrophenia" has roughly 400 spices on the master tapes. That is four tapes for four sides. Or roughly 100 splices/edited per side. And yet you never are aware that they are there.

[@graxjpg]

Zappa would do crazy things to tape. Daevid Allen too was a great artist that used tape itself as a musical medium.

[@gameloozer731]

Great video! Hard to find this kind of info on the internet, cheers

[@bob4analog]

Absolutely brilliant! I love tape editing!

[@johncall7532]

I love the new goofy/breezy narrative style !

[@rickhuff9030]

So great watching a pro!

[@Ralphmillerfilms]

John, You should mention that it is important to ″Degauss″ the razor blade. If you don't it can create an audible pop at each edit! Ralph Miller, Sound Editor.

[@tomdouglas6053]

I would love to visit this studio in the future.

[@andriealinsangao613]

Me too!

[@DMACK1981]

I just don't understand how you don't hear any pops. I use a DAW and I have pops all the time when editing...crossfades tend to fix those.

[@massapower]

Like a SURGEON... LUV IT !! 😁👍

[@dappawap]

I remember my "s assignment "in school where I removed all the s in the text , then assembled them and glued it to the end. I found that old tape and tried to play it but the glue did not hold after all those years. It is hard to beat digital technology.

[@AboveEmAllProduction]

man i love this dude, so pro :)

[@marcelosuarez3027]

Hey Electrical Audio, I admire you guys, and I really admire Steve of course, but just a question here, why is the bass in that song completely out of phase between L and R? i thought it sounded weird, checked it in mono, and there's literally NO AUDIO whatsoever before the rest of the band kicks in, and there's no bass when the band kicks in either. Was it actual decision to make the bass crazy wide? (i assume not, and i'm sure it was just a weird mistake in post production of the video or whatever) because it's really cancelling out.

[@ElectricalAudioOfficial]

I think it must be either an editing error, or you're hearing some inopportune mix of Jon's mic with some output from the control room speakers and the output of the desk.

[@marcelosuarez3027]

@@ElectricalAudioOfficial Must be something like that, or a polarity flipped cable, because it's all the way out. Great to see you replied!.

[@user-rl5zr1yk3p]

@@marcelosuarez3027seems like they were right about the Jon’s mic. Was completely out of phase when Jon was in the control room, but when he moved to the room where the tape machine itself is housed to make the splice the song isn’t out of phase anymore! 😂

[@charlesbonkley]

Awesome!

[@mouloudo]

5:24 😂

[@godblessrelative6291]

Was the record being edited in the video ever released? If so where can we go to purchase, download, or stream?

[@ElectricalAudioOfficial]

Yes! Mycanadiangirlfriend.bandcamp.com

[@CZghost]

I think that they have no reason to just record a song with a band just for demonstration purposes. He pretty sure already did the master tape edit for the whole album I guess and only used this song intro as demonstration on how the edit is done. Aside from that, I'm actually surprised that studios still use tape recordings even today. Digital recording is much easier to edit, much more resistent to noise and carrier errors and studio quality of over 96 kHz of sampling rate is way beyond the human ears hearing range, so I guess the quality of digital recording in studio and tape recording in studio are very similar if not indistinguishible. I think that tape is cheaper to record to nowadays, because for decent studio quality in digital form, you need a lot of things in best quality - the input equipment, the mixing equipment, the computer with best quality software (which isn't cheap at all), external audio card with super high sampling rate and quite big bit depth in order to achieve best quality sound, and of course you need really powerful computer hardware in order to handle all of that equipment. Analog equipment is much simpler in these terms and the quality of digital and analog recording is nearly same. I can see why studios still want to stay in analog realm...

[@hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh4585]

@@CZghost ok but who asked

[@raynefaded]

@@CZghost I mean.... obviously they didn't bring a band in to demo a tape edit for KZbin. That's a pretty long (and expensive) process. EA probably just asked the band if it was ok to record them doing an edit as the example came up.

[@MaxiBodyalive]

So long and hard work. Just to appreciate the analog era engineers. Digital audio editing is 10.000 times faster.

[@Cassius3745]

Why can't we hear the bass intro when he plays it?

[@Cassius3745]

The 1st couple times, that is.

[@emolovetree]

If you're listening on a phone without headphones it could be phase issues

[@visionofdisorder]

look at this beefy boi

[@AboveEmAllProduction]

comfortable and happy boi :)

[@damienlewis7882]

Ironically the music is out of phase on this video. Steve would NOT approve lol

[@MrAlFuture]

Yeah I'm surprised there aren't more comments about this. It's like having your ears sucked out of your head. I wonder if this was intentional so that copyright matching algorithms, which perhaps collapse to mono for simpler analysis don't "see" any music, or at least, different rough than the fingerprint of any tracks in their database.

[@GodsOfAudio]

@@MrAlFuture I'm reaching for my phase button on my console thinking "surely something is wrong with my system" only to find out everything sounds much better with one side flipped.....interesting indeed

[@graxjpg]

@@GodsOfAudio you watch KZbin through your mixing desk too? I love to send anything I hear through it so I can learn to use it better.

[@caivsivlivs]

i'm confused