A Quote by Herb Alpert

It's - as opposed to tape where you have a magnetic tape that's excited by frequencies that you hit, digital was a process where musical sounds are transferred to numbers and stored as numbers.
We get real picky about frequencies. Put it on a tape, start on tape, and it's kind of locked to how it sounds. Which would have been a very interesting thing to have done, but we were very aware that we wanted a bizarre kind of production value on the record.
I have a very limited knowledge of recording, but the miracle of being able to capture sounds on magnetic tape and the miracle of electricity, and these little magnetic particles, is amazing to me.
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.
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.
I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced. I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded. I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. I wonder if it's going to go back to that. Sometimes I think it has to. As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact.
We live in a digital world where all is available at the touch of a screen. Money has been simplified, changed subtly over time from tangible bills to numbers in cyberspace. Cash is no longer in a cloth bag; it's numbers on a screen. Numbers that can be manipulated and modified. If you run out of numbers, you can just buy some more, right?
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.
I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music.
Producing a one-hour show that has to reinvent musical numbers, and interpret those musical numbers with a large cast, is difficult.
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.
All I know is that when I mix to digital and when I mix to tape I compare them and the tape always wins out.
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.
I have mixed feelings about 'Car 54, Where Are You?' Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of 'The Wizard Of Oz'; it wouldn't be that interesting.
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?
The number of times that anything is overdubbed on 'Frampton Comes Alive!'... the rule was, if it didn't make it to the tape, then we can redo it because it needs to be done. If it made it to the tape, and it sounds good, we leave it. So nothing was overdubbed on that album at all that wasn't absolutely necessary.
20-some years ago, I'd have a big old radio with a tape deck, and I'd hit record and try to get something down on the tape, but nowadays, I can use my handy little smart-phone; I sing into the app for voice memo.
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