I know. You just run the -corner- of a sharp Ever-Ready single-sided reinforced blade to cut the width of the tape (held firm in a dished groove) in the editing block at its 90 or 45 degs slit. Agfa used to make industry-standard 1/4" jointing tape. You may need a Chinagraph wax pencil when editing. But not sure if the latter are still around.
>
Now if I could be bothered to dig out the 1/4" machine I might be tempted to try it. Slightly more of challange as my machine has a top speed of 7 1/2ips, I think, shows how long thats been sitting...
Good excercise though.
With a good sharp blade you use a chopping motion. Slicing the tape damages the edit block.
Still readily available.
No the misspellers get less paid to them, the ones that find the misspellings get the bargain.
mrcheerful
I'va always fixed audio tapes by cutting a 45-60 degree angle with scissors and supergluing a small overlap - almost unnoticeable.
What's the advantage of all this extra kit?
That might fix a broken tape which is going to be recorded over but is useless for actual tape editing.
It harks back to the days when audio was edited by splicing tape, before superglue was invented :-)
I doubt it will record over particularly well either set superglue is pretty ridged won't improve the head wrap...
Shame ! Have you never made a fade with a long diagonal splice ?
Wouldnt scraping the oxide off be more logical? Not that either is a great plan.
NT
I always wonderd why that stuff was so popular. Using wide tape at about 90 degrees is much easier ime.
NT
1960s tech for cross-fading. If it was good enough for Dr Who, it's good enough for Humppa.
It's very slow to trim the edges of wide sticky tape accurately to the edges of the rusty tape. Shouldn't take more than 5s to make an edit in 1/4" tape with the in and out points marked.
De-um-ing a tape can be done in not much more time, and occasionally less, that the time it would take to play it. Gosh it ages since I did any serious 1/4" editing, I have this urge...
No - I've always had access to a mixing desk to do anything other than simple editing. ;-) And to do a form of fade out with just the one machine did this by pulling the tape off the erase head. ;-)
You've never done serious fast tape editing. ;-)
The sound prep for those original Dr Who eps would have been made in Studio R at Lime grove by Jack Timms. To be played in at the recording by the gram op - the likes of me, although not then. ;-) And I've never seen this technique used, although I've heard about it. Studio R had several tape machines, turntables and a mixing desk. So you'd simply copy the part you wanted to do the cross fade between and do it with faders then chop it in - the audio quality of VTRs in those days was so well below a 1/4" machine it wouldn't have been noticeable.
Same here.
Reminds me of how I found out the hard way of a known fault on A80's. Very occasionally the bias on the erase head would not get turned off. Record something stop the machine, hand wind back to put in the red leader, play, hey wheres the mod gone... I think I wound back 2 or 3 times before I realised that something "odd" was going on. Fortunately it was nothing irreplaceable.
I had always understood that bias was basically a small level of signal derived from the erase oscillator and fed into the recording head to improve its characteristics.
Does this type of professional machine have a separate switch to turn off the erase function?
no, just the odd repair.
NT
I may be technically inaccurate. B-) Whatever, the erase head was still energised.
In effect yes but it should be automatic with pressing the stop button.
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required