Tape Recording Using a Fostex A8 8 Track featuring The Henrys playing Beatles songs
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ก.ย. 2024
- A tape recording session using a slightly modified Fostex A8 from 1981. Presented by Steve Christie, featuring The Henrys playing a selection of Beatles songs very well.
Music featured:
'Tape Test' (Steve Christie)
'Don't Hoover Me About' (Steve Christie)
The Henrys performing Ticket To Ride, Day Tripper, If I Fell, Misery (John Lennon & Paul McCartney) and Something (George Harrison)
Gear used:
Sontronix Orpheus and JZ V67 on vocals
2 x Oktava MK012's on busking amps
Hill Audio Concept 200 Desk (c. 1986)
Fostex A8
Ashly VCX 80 Limiters
Vintage Keys Studio Custom Stereo Spring Reverb
Filmed and Edited by Louisa Revolta
Recorded and Mixed by Steve Christie at Vintage Keys Studio
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Video and Soundtrack are Copyright Vintage Keys Records / Steve Christie
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14:30 holy crap this band is incredible. one of my favorite tunes. these guys are amazing
Love that tape saturation. Well done sir. Love and light. Paul.
Thank you!
The Henrys sound wonderful!
I do hope Mr. Christie gets a holiday soon.
Henrys (Henries?) are fab! Hope they do well, such talent!
I’m an IT technician at a “leading UK research university” and I have the same terror that you do when I try to remove the backs of laptops
Brilliant video, as always. It's right up my street with my passion for any old tech with valves in it. (Thinks: I really must get round to totting up the number of radios, tape recorders and bits of test gear I've accumulated over the years, much to my wife's delight!) Cheers & best 73s!
What a nice extra to add some footage from the recording session following this well-made presentation! Thanks for sharing and all the best :-)!
Those early Fostexes are seriously good. I recall as a teen sending away for the Fostex catalog when this was all new, back in 1981. There was a card in the Modern Recording magazine, and you could circle the number(s) of the information you wanted, it was all linked up to the advertisements in the magazine. It would be very cool to figure out how to record all 8 simultaneously. Thanks for the excellent video! And thanks for exposing the Henrys!
Thank you very much Clyde! Great memories! My first Fostex was a 160 4 track - still have one. It’s really good sound quality, as is the A8! :)
@@VintageKeysStudio I still have my 4 track portastudio from the mid 80s. By then, they were using dolby C, I think. Did Fostex make a companion mixer for the A8, when it was released?
That was rather brilliant!
Cool man! I also got a Fostex 8 track hiding around somewhere.. i forgot it had such a cool sound..of course very quick saturation with 8 tracks on quarter inch (cassette width) it sounds a bit like hi-speed cassette. love the compression/saturation it adds! I must dig it up again and do some recordings on it. Sounds very cool man, you calibrated it well, wich is a pain in the butt without a repro head :') Cheers dude!
Cheers, yes it was calibrate - wind back - listen… took ages! It sounds great overdriven now
I’ve got many good memories of my A8 but would never want to go back. Looking back to it in reverence would be akin to talking oneself into the obvious lie that vinyl is better. Still I recorded many projects on it including 2 full albums. The squeaking was inbuilt though but did not seem to influence the recorded signal much. Your recording brings back memories. A very wide and pleasant chorus overall sound (inbuilt wow an flutter) but no frequency headroom. It for instance totally murders drum recordings. Using expense Ampex 456 brought some relief but nothing on the long term. And so I spent a fortune on what is now a pile of spools filled with unbound oxide. Love them Beatle tribute guys though.
I love it. Process and creative palette influence the final result! You are a mad scientist. (Henrys are great!)
Always impressed with what you can get out of the old gear, hats off to you for restoring the 4 track.
I thought The Henrys sounded fantastic too.
Great video again Steve and as always Louisa knocks it out the park.
I only hope that when you go on your long overdue holiday it's not by mistake.
Haha. Thanks very much Keiran :)
Great Reel2Reel,..Often it says serviced,..But then it got several issues, As with my Tandberg x3000,..BTW Beautiful recording,...Thanks a lot for all lovely bits you share with us out here. Love cheers😃💕
Thanks, you too!
Steve, What a Wonderful video !!
You are incredible ! What restoration of that A8 recorder, what a way to improve the recorder , you played guitars , drums and lots of more things !
And of course those Two Henry Beatles really sounded like Five Ones!
I am missing a Lot not to be living in LONDON !!
Thank you very much, Jesus!
@@VintageKeysStudio Bless you,Steve!!
Love this hardware video! I had the Fostex R8 for a few years, your’s is the precursor to the R8 i believe. Cheers man!
Cheers - yes it is the precursor to the R8. I used an R8 from 1992 to 1998 - it was fabulous, although back then I didn’t know how to fix them, so when it broke, that was it!
@@VintageKeysStudio Yes, the R8 suffered from the the plastic reel pulley. I ended up purchasing metal pulley replacements for the R8 (similar to the A8, I believe) from Tascam Ninja. After that it worked like a dream! Many of those Fostex R8 Simply need to replace the pulley with the Tascam ninja ones and they will last a long time, as many of the pulleys wore out early on and those machines still have plenty of life. In any case, love your videos and humor! Carry on Sir!
Thanks very much. If only I had known this back in the late 90s when I scrapped my old R8 in favour of a digital workstation!
The right hand Henry looks like someone I used to go to uni with who was an awesome guitarist :) But I suspect the Henry is younger :D :D
Great video! I kind of miss the days of tape. I have a Tascam 3340 4-trk, a Tascam TRS 1/2 " 8-trk, and a Otari 2-trk, but sadly, they are all in disrepair. Recording to tape yields such a wonderful sound.
Yes it’s a shame there’s a massive graveyard of tape recorders out there
I recently got me a Fostex A2 and it had the very same problems as yours!
Ahh - I hope you get it sorted :)
Ça me rappelle mon 4 pistes Fostex. Lol
This is awesome. PS I love your accent. Are you European or something
Portuguese
air yes they have alot of old gear note they do sell some on time to time i had alot of 14 inch spools from air
i service all my gear yes you are very right age is getting to the gear just got in to betacam sp audio side because i am finding
gear harder to find as juck decks black face ADAT are hard now i keep them for the head drums and face plates
hi have some fostex same as a pair if you are tuning up a fostex 1/4 it's best to have 2 of the same track format
one to do the record level past tape over to the next deck to check the audio level like the delay trick save rew ff the tape all the time
Cool little 8 track machine. Too bad it onle records 4 at once but lovely saturation. I have the larger 8 track machines and they are cool but lack the fuzzy saturation these smaller width 8 tracks have.
Sir i wann ask, what sample rate did u use for recording? Is it 44khz or 96 khz? Thankyou
The transfer of 15ips analog tape and the video audio itself was done at 48khz
@@VintageKeysStudio thankyou Sir 🙌 that means alot to me🙏
Great but I must caution about ever using an Electrolux 504 with an Sm58. They really suck.
With today's technology, available in the home, may I respectfully ask why one would use such devices as this to record, please?
Why not? It sounds good and it’s fun and I think more interesting than just leaving it up to a computer to record something.
@@VintageKeysStudio I get what you're saying but I have to respectfully disagree with your implication that the computer does the recording!
Reel to Reel or Laptop -they are just tools! WE record music.
My question is, assuming, like 99.9% of the population of this planet, when one is faced with a job; one prefers the best tools, why would someone choose tape over today's technology?
I can readily understand why someone would choose a computer over multitrack tape because there is very obvious and provable benefits in noise and fidelity and cost&convenience but what I am asking is simply this:
"why would anyone choose multitracked tape over, say, a DAW?"
The reason I ask is also the reason I searched for such content as yours, on TH-cam and that is, sitting literally a stone throw from where the Beatles lived and worked during their formative career, I am being offered a Fostex80 multitrack Reel to Reel to store at my home studio and use until such a time as it can be sold on to someone who would appreciate it and my thinking is simply:
"why would I use THIS instead of my usual reaper program?"
I truly don't have any dog in this fight I'm just genuinely asking;-)
I don't question why the Amish want to live the way they do even if I don't want to live that way and I don't scorn groups privately and excitedly playing music to each other purely because it was recorded analog even if I would choose not to get that involved it's just that is there more than 'bragging rights' to all this?
Thanks in advance for ANYONE's thoughts and comments and thank YOU also for replying so swiftly 🙏
You can't mod it so it records on all eight tracks at the same time. You would need to mod almost every pcb in that thing. I also had the idea, studied the schematics and I gotta say it's merely impossible to do it the right way.
little addon... you would need to buy the A8-LR connector board, system control and all 4 channel cards. Good luck with that...
Yeah, I put the schematic down and had a nice cup of tea instead