Tape Delay System
Instead, Townsend came up with a system using tape delay, after similar principles already in place for echoes applied via tape during a song mixdown. In essence, Townsend's system added a second tape recorder to the regular setup. When mixing a song, its vocal track was routed from the recording head of the multitrack tape, which was before the playback head, and fed to the record head of the second tape recorder. An oscillator was used to vary the speed of the second machine, providing more or less delay depending on how fast or slow the second machine was run relative to the first. This signal was then routed from the playback head of the second machine to a separate fader on the mixer. This allowed the delayed vocal to be combined with the normal vocal, creating the double tracked effect.
Read more about this topic: Automatic Double Tracking
Famous quotes containing the words tape, delay and/or system:
“We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To achieve the larger goal of teaching her children consideration of others, a mother can tolerate some frustration of her own wishes, she can delay having what she wants, she can be flexible enough to compromise. And this is exactly what her child must also learn: that it is possible to survive frustration, it is possible to wait for what he wants, it is possible to compromise without capitulating.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“Those words freedom and opportunity do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down. Any paternalistic system that tries to provide for security for everyone from above only calls for an impossible task and a regimentation utterly uncongenial to the spirit of our people.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)