Noah Budd

Can Old-School Tape Delay Give Your Music the Boost It Needs?

A few months ago, I stumbled upon mi padre's antique Ampex reel to reel tape machine in the attic while I was visiting home for Thanksgiving. At the time I was interested in learning about different sampling methods and discovered that you can scratch a reel to reel tape deck very similarly to the way you can scratch a vinyl turn table. You can then process the audio output into you DAW and go from there. I was like, "this is awesome, I want to manipulate sound in a really weird way and THIS COULD BE MY OPPORTUNITY BOO YA!" However I never really used the reel to reel tape deck (because it was a bitch to set up) and it ended up collecting dust in my bedroom studio... until I discovered tape delay.