Drum Machine into the Tape Deck

pic via our friends at matrixsynth

OK, new tricks:

VL-Tone drum machine --> Input 5 on Tascam Board -->
Submix Out 5--> Tascam 122 Tape Deck --> Tape Monitor Out on 122 -->
Input 1 on Tascam Board --> Buss 4 on Tascam Board --> Fostex 250 4-track

Does that seem complex? Well... it is. Basically what I'm doing is using the board and 122 to overdrive and eq, then tape saturate the signal before bringing it back into the 4 track. In more simple terms I'm recording the recording of the VL-Tone. It's fucking awesome. Additionally I cranked the bass at about 60hz to make it hit a little harder.

You have to be careful with it, but you can also get an infinite repeats feedback loop going by feeding a little of Submix out 1 (the signal that's going to the 4 track) into the 122. Cranking it past 1 or 2 will blow everything up (which might be cool if you sampled it), so be forewarned.

You get a lot of natural tape compression from the saturation which I think adds a ton of punch (or Dick/Fuck as we say in the industry) and I might start doing it with all drums/drum machines. Sadly this technique can only work with the first track you lay down because of the several ms of latency between the original input and the output from the 122 back to the 4-track.

Remember you can only do this if your tape deck has 2 or more heads and both a TAPE and SOURCE monitor switch. Of course if your deck has a speed switch and fine adjust knob, you can use it as a slap back echo.

Crushingly, my famed Fostex 250 is not doing so hot. Considering that it's over 25 years old, and has seen umpteen hours of use in the last 3 years, this is less than surprising. As luck would have it, however, I responded to a craigslist ad for a Tascam 464. The 464 is the upgraded version of the classic 424 (not to be confused with the 424 MKIII - the 464 is still better). Arguably the best tabletop 4 track Tascam ever made (the 234 is cooler, but rackmount). A good condition 424 goes for $100-$175 on that eeebay, but no one knows about the 464. I paid $65 bucks for this beast and am damn pleased about it. The transport is super-stable and the pre's sound great. I'm of course still running everything through the board, and the only drawback to this unit is that it doesn't feature direct tape inputs (which you could probably hack into by looking at the insert returns on the first two tracks and duplicating the wiring on 3 and 4 - it's probably a lot of work though). I've dumped the tracks off the Minidisc and am ready to record some vocals, so we'll see how it turns out. So far I'm immensely pleased with this purchase.

As for the Fostex, I'm going to try and either swap the pinch roller off a newer broken tape deck, or pay $35 for a reconditioned pinch roller from Terry's.

Korg EX-800 Mod, Part 2

After seven years of talking about it, I finally modified something. I went ahead and did the Moog Slayer mod (cutoff and resonance knobs for the filter), the FM mod for DCO1 and the noise control knob. Here are some pictures of the process.


I drilled the case out, installed the knobs and grounded them together.


Here I've attached the leads to the pots.
Top Left is Resonance, Bottom Left is Cutoff, Top Right is Oscillator, Bottom Right is Noise.



Larger view of compete front panel assembly.
The pots with marker on them are the pots I added. The middle three are original.


Instead of using heat shrink I bought some Liquid Electrical Tape.


It works really well, but it smells awful and it's super drippy.
It took two coats to get really covered.


Internal board with mods wired in. I chose not to replace the resistors on
the board because I didn't want to ruin it.


Finally, I grounded the whole whole thing. The red wire on the right
has a resistor covered in liquid tape running to the cutoff pot.

The big question is, "How does it sound?" It sounds amazing.

Korg EX-800 Mod, Part 1

I'm going to attempt to modify my Korg EX-800. "Atom Smasher" from synthmod.net has a fairly easy looking filter mod known as "The Moog Slayer" for my rackmount Poly-800. It involves removing two trim pots from the board and case mounting them so you can manually control the analog filter. While I'm at it, I'm going to swap the NOISE control trim pot on the board for a case mount pot as well.

He also has a slightly more complicated mod where you jump one of the points on the DCO's IC chip and control the oscillator's cutoff with a knob. I'm not really sure what that means, but if the filter mod goes well, I might try the other one.

I went ahead and removed the trim pots and I've ordered the parts along with a step drill bit to put clean holes in the metal case.



VR5 is the resonance, VR2 is the filter cutoff.





VR3 is the noise level.



Trim pots after I de-soldered them from the board.

MMDS & Springsteen::Kennedy & Lincoln

FIRST LOOK: ROCK HALL'S SPRINGSTEEN EXHIBIT OPENING APRIL 1
The TEAC 4-track recorder Bruce used to record Nebraska -- that's it above, the very one. And you'll be able to see it up close and personal at Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Museum in less than a month. On April, 1, during the Rock Hall's 2009 Induction Week, they'll unveil their latest exhibit, "From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen." via backstreets

Hmmm... who's 4track does this look like? Our Fostex 250 is almost identical to the TEAC 144. See, we're just that awesome.

dbx Model 700 Digital Audio Processor

Uh... did you know this existed?

The dbx Model 700 Digital Audio Processor was a professional audio ADC/DAC combination unit, which digitized a stereo analog audio input into a bitstream, which was then encoded and encapsulated in an analog composite video signal, for recording to tape using a VCR as a transport. Unlike other similar pieces of equipment like the Sony PCM-F1, the Model 700 used a technique called Companded Predictive Delta Modulation, rather than the now-common pulse-code modulation.

Yeah, did you understand that? It's a rack unit that records 644kbs audio to a VHS tape. I would give up one of my toes for one of these. Any information regarding where one of these units might be aquired would be greatly appreciated. Check out this period review.

"Get Ready and Roll the Cassette"

Estate Sale. 25¢ each.

(05) Maxell MX 110 - Metal Type IV HIGHEST BIAS EVER
(10) Maxell XLII 100 - Type II High Bias
(08) TDK SA 90 - Type II High Bias
(02) TDK SA-X 90 - Type II High Bias
(02) Maxell UDII CD74 - [it always seemed odd to me that you'd manufacture a tape that was the same length as a CD since that makes each side 37 minutes long. Most cds are about 45-50 minutes long, so it actually makes the most sense to buy 110 minute tapes and put an album on each side. The drawback of course being that 110 minute tapes snap fairly easily.]

Ghosts of Moon Mission's Past

Today was transfer day, and by that I mean I finally got around to running a bunch of 10-15 year old cassettes to the PC. (I ran them at 48/24... i know it's silly to use such a high encoding bit rate since they're old tapes, but it's just a thing I like doing.) It was mostly some old 4track mixdowns from junior high (most of which is just bizarre), a tape of my metal band Malidiktor from the 7th grade - early 7th grade at that, and a MMDS show I taped from 2003. They came out pretty well for using the IdeaPad's sound card (which does leave quite a bit to be desired for pro-audio purposes) and Audacity (which I love and swear by).

The live show was in pretty bad shape, but it's cleaned up fairly well. I recorded it as an afterthought on a crappy 70's Panasonic school tape player (the same one I now use to listen to tapes on my bike) sitting in front of the tiny PA at Shooties' Lounge (no longer in existence) on Reno and Sooner in Midwest City, OK. It's actually a pretty good show for me having called Daniel and said, "Bring your drums, we're playing a show tonight." I know there are a couple of songs that he'd maybe only heard once and we just decided to wing it. I think that's a strong testament to what a great drummer my brother is when he wants to be. After soaping out all the motor noise and hiss, it's thin, and the vocals aren't quite as loud as I wish they were, but it sounds sort of OK. I'll post it after I cut it up and convert it to MP3.

On the whole there weren't really any "uncovered gems", but I didn't expect there to be. I do wish I had more live shows taped, but oh well. If you ever played a show with us that you recorded, let me know.

No, the little door comes down, then you put the tape in.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Tascam 202MKIII at Value World in Garland for $24.24 - this is my best thrift store find since Meg picked up that Martin last year. This was a $400 dollar deck new, and this little beauty works perfectly. It was dirty and that's all. And by dirty, I mean it physically had dirt all over it. Weird. As I was walking away to check to see if the deck worked I spied a... wait for it... original 1/2 rackspace Alesis Midiverb for $1.91! Not the crappy midiverb II, but the first generation lawsuit model. Looks like they go for about $60 on ebay, so I'll probably sell it after I play around with it for a while.

^^UPDATE^^ Uh, so it seems that all 80's Alesis products use a 9 volt AC current? Weird. I have no intention of buying that crazy adapter, so I suppose the MIDIverb wasn't as sweet as I thought. Oh well.

TestToneTape

I am such an idiot. I've spent years working with tape recording... 4 tracks, reel to reel, multiple levels of mixdown between decks. For some stupid reason I've never used a calibrating test tone to stripe the beginning of tapes. I've read about it before, but just always blown it off. This came back to bite me in the ass recently when I dumped some tracks back to the 4track and accidentally had the pitch just slightly off. Re-tuning the track was the biggest hassle I've dealt with in months. As a result, I'm now running a 440hz and 333.33hz tone at the start of every tape. Later, regardless of what equipment the tape is played back on, the deck can be tuned to make it run at it's original speed and pitch. Why didn't I think of this before? Because I'm a moron that's why. Honestly, I would suggest doing this even with digital recordings. It can't hurt.

As a side note about analog vs. digital: I still have 4track tapes from 1995 whereas I've lost whole records due to digital audio workstations crashing. Think about it.

My Minidisc Brings All the Boys to the Yard...

Well, I finally figured out what to do with my $2.00 minidisc deck. I now use it as a lossless, transparent intermixing stage! "But, Mason," you say, "What the fuck does that mean?". Well, dear boy, I'll tell you. When you're 4-tracking, sometimes you actually need more tracks. One option is mixing down what's been done to cassette (what I've done in the past) before running it back into the four track. This leads to over-compression, loss of highs and lows, pitch problems and the over-dubs sounding more clear and upfront than the original four backing tracks. That sucks. The other option (this is where the MD deck comes in) is mixing down to a lossless digital medium to run back into the 4-track. HAHA! Yeah, I know, I'm pretty happy about it too. Is this cheating? Maybe, but who fucking cares. I really need a standalone audio CD burner with a really good A/D converter for the digital dump from the cassette master.

I finally fixed our myspace.

For three years our myspace has been frozen. Now, I hate myspace, but our old drummer set one up. I didn't know the username or password to login to it, so it just sat. Today I got a spam email from myspace, and via that, figured out the login, got the password and changed it around. Friend us if you want, I don't really care, I'll probably never look at it again. Just thought you might want to know.

Also, the next record is about half done. And don't forget to vote for Barack Obama.

Hello, I made a new covers album.

sorry John Prine, the picture of you wouldn't fit.

So I'm sort of into this covers thing lately while we're working on the next album. (Songs are written for new record, drums and guitars are recorded, you'll probably hear it some time). Anyway, it's called "Songs You Loved in High School", so here are fourteen songs by seven artists that I like. It's pretty lo-fi (which is on purpose), tell me what you think in the comments section.


The Cure-Boys Don't Cry
Neil Young-After the Goldrush
The Velvet Underground-Candy Says
Morrissey-Every Day is Like Sunday
REM-Losing My Religion
John Prine-Sam Stone
The Velvet Underground-New Age
The Cure-Friday I'm in Love
Warren Zevon-Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
John Prine-Speed of the Sound of Lonliness
Warren Zevon-Splendid Isolation
REM-Man on the Moon
Neil Young-Tell Me Why
Morrissey-Last of the Famous International Playboys

We recorded drums for our new album

I went to Oklahoma in mid-March and recorded drums and guitar for 11 songs for our As-Yet-Untitled-2009-Album. I forgot to post it when it happened, so sorry for that.

Sharp Dressed Fan: A 4-Track Tribute to ZZ Top

Sharp Dressed Fan: A 4-Track Tribute to ZZ Top

OK, it's done. I present to you our new EP "Sharp Dressed Fan: A 4-Track Tribute to ZZ Top" performed by The Big Black Bearded Caller. Here are the links to the 256kbps MP3 files. Let me know if you want the FLACs or if you want to give me $2 I'll mail you a cassette tape.

01-Gimmie All Your Loving
02-Doubleback
03-Cheap Sunglasses
04-Sleeping Bag
05-Tush
06-Sharp Dressed Man

(you need to right click and save to listen)

I think it's pretty obvious that I really dislike ZZ Top's music. I purposely chose not to listen to any of these songs before I recorded them. Consequently, you get a six new Moon Mission Death Squad songs that just happen to have ZZ Top lyrics. I'm pleased with it.

It's all analog up to the digital conversion. Analog synths, effects and drum machines (and guitars, obviously); analog mixer to the 4-track cassette; analog mixdown to the cassette master. No digital effects, compression, or mastering. Just ripped from cassette to FLAC to 256kbps MP3. I'm really pretty happy with the way it came out. Let me know what you think.

And yeah, so I cross posted this to my personal blog... so what?

-------------------------------------------------------
The Moon Mission Death Squad hates ZZ Top

Five New Songs

the worst guitar clip art i could find.

I've written five new songs since I finshed the last record. In case you don't know, that's a lot for me. I usually write about fifteen to twenty a year, but more spread out than this.

The new songs are:
4-Track
The Game Has Changed
Calculated Seasons
Excesses of Waste
Thinning Out the Herd

I'm pretty pleased with all of them. I feel that they're all really strong and I'm definitely moving forward with 4tracker/attacker as a jumping off point. Unlike most of those songs, I'll actually be able to play and sing ALL of these, having written them all on acoustic guitar instead of building them on tape and then writing words over them.

Come over and I'll play them for you.

I love the Gin Blossoms.

Hey, I bet you'd say you don't really like The Gin Blossoms, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be a fucking asshole then. The Gin Blossoms are totally fucking awesome. I love them. Here's a song I recorded on the most classic of lo-fi tape decks. I'm too lazy to run it from cassette into the computer, so I just held my pocket pc over the speaker as I played the tape back and recorded a wave file. It turned out exactly how I wanted it.



feed reader users click here.

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The Moon Mission Death Squad rolls joints made of power pop for you to smoke.

moonmissiondeathsquad.com

Hey, Moon Mission Death Squad fans (yeah, both of you, you fuckers)! moonmissiondeathsquad.com is back in action! I re-registered it for three years. Unfortunately, whatever host I had been using before still has .org and .net locked, but we'll get those back eventually. I chose to forgo the .biz or .info, because those are only for white-trash and Nigerian bank scams.

It's just a mask of the virb, but all that matters is it's google-ability.

check it.

4tracker/attacker is HERE!

pull the full size cover here.

Ok, you've heard about it for months now, and it's finally here.

Download the 320kbs mp3 via the web here.
Grab the torrent of the 320kbs mp3 here.
Grab the torrent of FLAC files [if you have your shit together] here.

*****UPDATE******9/26/2007
demonoid.com is having some issues, i will repost the torrents hosted somewhere else.

Some new artwork