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Comment by jim-jim-jim | Hacker News Reader

I've only ever made music with tape: cassettes and 1/4" reels. I'm not nostalgic or in search of any "lofi" sound (if recorded right, it shouldn't be that noisy anyway). I just really don't want to use a computer after work. My bet at the time was also that tape is more future-proof. Steve Albini has written about this.

I'm not so sure about the latter point. Can still get new reels, but I don't think they make the type II cassettes anymore. I also got my Portastudio for 30 bucks, but they go for 500 now, since all the chatter I've heard suggests Tascam has no interest in ever making something so complex and mechanical again. Sourcing tape heads for the RTR might also be a problem in the future.

Don't regret the decision though; just think I was lucky getting into the game 10 years ago. So much of my favorite minimal synth, industrial, and post-punk was made the same way, so it just makes sense to compose around this interface.

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> Steve Albini has written about this.

Would you mind sharing a reference? I found a short but interesting digital-vs-analog take by Albini on Youtube: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=8ibDfUU7cKw

EDIT: Here's a good, lenghty masterclass with Albini: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=sKEzHie9tAI

As an European and non-musician, this is actually my first encounter with him; I now, however, cannot stop listening to the way he expresses his thoughts. Really interesting, deep and well-articulated guy.

Apologies, but my memory is hazy. The more I think about it, the more it might have been a video interview, but no luck zeroing in on it on Youtube. His points boiled down to:

- Tape is a dead simple concept that's been around for ages. It will continue to be understood.

- Failures in analog media are more salvageable than digital ones.

- Importing a DAW session from 20 years ago and trying to reproduce the work while dealing with incompatibilities, DRM, drivers, etc is way harder than just spinning a reel.

- If you've captured the feel you're going for in the initial recording, you don't need the intricate processing options a DAW offers.

I mostly disagree with his first point. I'm not an engineer, but I'm under the impression that some precision work goes into the mechanics of these things. I can envision a future where the market just isn't there to pay anybody to make them correctly. Finding repairs is already hard enough.

I'm not a massive fan of Albini, but he is a well-spoken guy who seems to know his stuff. My favorite musical work of his is probably "Songs About Fucking," and his best production job is "Thank Your Lucky Stars" by Whitehouse. Both are so noisy but audible. The professional/alien sheen of the latter work is a major outlier in the genre of power electronics, which is usually very DIY and unfortunately rather murky despite the extreme frequencies employed.

Thanks for such a detailed reply. His (or other analog audio devotees') thoughts on the environmental impact and ecological footprint of tape recording would be really interesting to hear.

It is tempting to state "digital is more environmental friendly". But developing new hardware and software obviously bears an ecological burden as well, whereas that old analog gear can be used more or less "as is" for decades.

I'm interested in analog mostly because I feel DAW screens are tiring for the brain. And, as an occasional producer of a long-form radio program, I often think whether a show produced in a more "analog manner" (solely relying on my ears, not my eyes during montage) would have a different "feel".

For that reason, CLI-only software like ecasound or mixer4 [1] have been interesting to me for a long time; so far, during real montage work, I have nonetheless always opted for DAW-based solutions, or maybe simple destructive audio editors. Still like the idea of not having to look at the waveform for making my cuts, though.

1: https://ecasound.seul.org/ecasound/, http://www.acousticrefuge.com/mixer4.htm

You might like his music too, which might be described as harsh guitar-driven industrial punk. I'd start with "The Rich Man's 8 Track Tape" by Big Black.

+1, I got into eurorack to get away from screens. My workflow goes into a 6-channel Allen & Heath mixer, and while I'm still outputting to garageband on an ipad, the whole point was I wanted to make the kind of music I liked - shitty mix tapes of early electronic and industrial music played through a radioshack ghettoblaster or cheap headphones. I don't care about the affect of expensive production, I want to hear what the musician thought was cool in the context of the original constraints.

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