Using tape recorders to warm up tracks w/o recording into tape

[Farshad]

Hi everyone,

I am new to this very interesting forum (which I was luckily reffered by a link from another website that I do not rememebr). One of the first topics I searched for here was: "warming up digital blah blah" and not surprisingly found a bunch. I have been recording digital for a while and own some outboard gear and so called "warmer" plugins. Recenetly I got my hands on a nice Sony cassette deck and came up with this question which might sound silly:

I have recorded some tracks (not full mixes) back and forth into the unit and got some nice results (in the few cases I tried I believe it worthed the extra noise and signal deterioration). Now, I am wondering does only passing the signal trough the unit, by just having it paused in recording mode, without actually recording into tape, impart any character to the sound? I am not sure if the signal pass would be totally passive this way. I will give it a shot myself but I thought it is better to ask you guys to prevent myself just believeing that it sounds better.!

Thanks in advance for any input.

Cheers,

-Farshad

[rufus13]

Putting a casstte deck in record mode only allows you to loop the signal through the amplifiers. No tape rolling = no tape effects.

Get a 3-head deck. Monitor from the playback head while rolling tape in rec-mode. You get noise/compression, and a little slappy delay! Fun for pre-delaying a reverb chamber/ventilation duct.

If you put a car cassette adapter into a tape deck, you can feed signal to the head. That may give you a certain ugliness that you are looking for. Phat magnetic coupling and such.

[Farshad]

HI Karl,

Thanks for the reply. Do you know any 3-head tape recorder or any online retailer? I will also look at that car tape adapter.

Cheers,

-Farshad