No one has any faith in the tape anymore - everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don't. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.
I don't have any computers in my studio, it's all analog tape. All analog tape, all old equipment, I mean my mics are like from the 60's and early 70's, everything in there is old.
One day, digital will be it. Analog will just be another oddity, and that's fine, too. I have no great misgivings about it, but there will always be something to analog. It's the smell of the tape and all that visceral, physical stuff.
That first tape I did dropped in 2009. It was just for fun, I'm like 'I'm just going to do something to have fun.' Everyone was just 'put out a tape. You're young. You've got money. It ain't gonna hurt you. Who's it gonna hurt?' So what I ended up doing was I put out the tape, pressed up 20,000 CDs, flooded the streets.
Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.
Tape machines are effects boxes as well because each tape machine has its own sound. You can over-load a tape machine or you can bump it a certain way so it compresses or makes a sound, tape saturation.
I like to work with a combination of analog and Pro Tools. I love the sound of analog tape, but there's so many things you can do with Pro Tools that would be incredibly difficult and very time-consuming with analog.
All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.
This is the analogy I use is: A lot of guys tape their ankles, a lot of guys use braces on their ankles. But that becomes something your body relies on. It actually weakens your ankle muscles. So if you were to ever not use the tape or brace, or do lifts, you may not be as strong.
Tape allows for a clean sweep of data that simply doesn't need to be on any form of disk but still needs to be kept. The cost and capacity of tape makes these 'just in case' copies very affordable.
So, I bought a new CD and I was trying to get it open but couldn't with all the layers... I mean plastic and then tape, and the tape is like government tape. It says 'open here.' Is that sarcasm?
To me, the "tape" is the final arbiter of any investment decision. I have a cardinal rule: Never fight the tape!
People who leave their cars on the street with tape covering their broken windows are obviously too trusting. I mean, when your car did have glass for a window, someone broke into it. How is tape any more of a deterrent? What are the thieves going to say? Ooh, that like looks like duct tape, we can't beat that. Let's look for one with scotch or masking.
Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.
I don't like any tape on my body, so I'm just trying to figure out what works best for me mentally, and for my wrist as well. We have to try and tape my wrist a different way every single practice to find a way.
When we had the San Francisco Tape Music Center, we had a couple of Ampex tape machines there, and I could string tape from one machine, past the heads, and over to the next machine to the supply-reel amp, and have another delay there.
Now clearly this advantage is when the data on tape has been found and just needs to be transferred back. You need to add a minute or so of seek time to find the data. On large transfers, though, tape should outpace most disk systems. From an ingest perspective, LTO-6 and other enterprise tape formats may be unrivaled when compared on a single unit basis.