What a lovely coincidence that tape, originally a recording medium, works beautifully for distortion and saturation. Whatever the reason, tape saturation is a popular effect. If you want subtle, pristine saturation, there are various meticulous models of high-quality studio equipment. That was one topic in our interview earlier this week with Universal Audio’s Dr. David Berners. (UA’s model is intended to model the entire multitrack tape deck, so quite a bit different.) There’s also, on a much gentler budget, a simple saturation effect in the US$79 Harrison Mixbus, intended more for the saturation behavior on main or submix buses than for replicating the tape equipment itself.

But sometimes pristine, high-fidelity tape equipment is the opposite of what you want. You want, instead, raunchy, destructive, dirty distortion. To me, like many others, that’s more valuable. And it can cost nearly nothing, if you’re willing to scrounge.

You don’t need any pricey equipment: just one unwanted tape deck and a CD-to-cassette adapter you almost certainly have buried in a drawer or closet.

And yes, as many have noted, this is really best considered an overdrive effect rather than tape saturation. (Tape player saturation? There is a faux cassette tape in it, at least. But it isn’t saturation created by the tape medium, so technically, it’s really just a clever overdrive distortion hack; I agree with commenters.)

Helsinki-based producer and musician Riku Annala shares in a video tutorial how this works.

He writes:

Really, it’s just a simple, almost stupid trick and I’m 99% sure that many others have realized it too, but I’ve never bumped into it anywhere. It seems at the moment that producers are trying to get away from the clean digital sound and there is a clear lo-fi trend going on. I’ve always been somehow fascinated with old c-cassette tapes (I’m a product of the 80′s) and I got myself an old tape deck for experimantation purposes. Here is the catch, I realized that by using one of those 3mm jack CD-to-tape adapters that are used in tape car stereo’s for plugging external players, you can route digital (or any) audio through the tape deck to color the audio in various different ways!

More on his blog:
Studio Experiment #1: Tape Saturation for Cheapskates [Recue]

Well worth checking out his music, too, whilst you’re there.

Variations on this trick? (I’m working on some hacks with a speed-variable portable tape player.) Other ideas? Make anything interesting this way? Let us know in comments.

Photos courtesy Recue.

If you’re using Ableton Live 8, you’ve hopefully already discovered the joys of Track Groups. Track grouping is a welcome feature in any DAW, but in Live, the mixer-centric Session View can easily get unruly with endless columns of vertical tracks.

I wanted to share some discoveries about Track Groups, including what I thought was a big realization about how they worked with clips that turned out not to be as exciting as I thought.

To group tracks, select multiple tracks first (click one, then shift-click the last one), right-click (ctrl-click on Mac), and choose Group Tracks. The result – what’s basically a submix:

• You can save space by collapsing tracks in your view, clicking the triangle at the top of the Group
• You can add insert effects to the whole Group, and signal will be routed through that entire chain (making them like a quick send)
• You can control the whole “submix” Group at once using the Group’s mixer parameters

No surprise there. Here’s the surprise.

You’ll see when you create a Group that the Group track has actual clip slots – unlike the Returns, which have none. (Check out “A Return” and “B Return,” created by default, to see what I mean.) You’ll also see a colored pattern for each clip slot that is adjacent to grouped tracks with clips in them:

You can use that slot (seen here on the left) to trigger groups of clips. So, if you’ve grouped four tracks, and the first three of clips, triggering the clip in the Group track will trigger all of those clips at once.

It works just as Scenes do, but with a couple of twists. Unlike Scenes, you won’t trigger everything else in your Session – you have some control over what gets triggered. Also, you’ll see if you click one of the slots for the Group, you get a Clip View for editing.

At this point I got really excited, as I thought we might finally have Scenes that had the same editing parameters as Clips. No such luck. If you click one of the Group slots, you’ll see Clip, Launch, and Notes boxes. This includes things that Scenes lack – Launch Mode options, Quantization override, and Follow Action. So, initially, you might think as I did that we finally had the ability to have Scenes (albeit inside Groups) with more control and Follow Actions. Unfortunately, these actually behave as “wildcard” editing for the Clips. So what you’re actually doing is changing the Follow Actions for all the clips to the right of the Group slot.

That said, you can still use this as a hack to quickly create chains of Follow Action events, so it still could be useful – just not as useful as if Ableton finally gave us more control over Scenes or other groups of clips.

One last note: as further illustration of this principle, you can’t rename the slots in the Groups. That’s too bad, because it would allow you to create effectively grouped Clips that controlled Subclips. If you try to use the Clip Name box, you’ll actually rename all the Clips in the Group – and you still won’t see any text in the slot in the Group.

To me, it would be more consistent if both Scenes and Clip slots for Track Groups behaved exactly the same way individual clips did, enabling the quantization and follow actions that clips do. But that’s just my take.

There are people who are bigger Ableton gurus than I am who read this site, not to mention various people who work for Ableton, so I’m curious to hear what you think about this, and if you have other ideas for how to use Groups. I do remain a little disappointed, because you get track groups in lots of DAWs, but you only get Clips in Ableton Live.

Our friend David Battino has the solution, and while it’s a simple trick, it wound up being the deal-maker for buying Korg’s cute little “dynamic phrase synth”:

What loosened my credit card was a secret hack Korg revealed during fact-check: If you power up the Kaossilator while holding down the Tap and Loop Rec buttons, the loop memory doubles from two bars to four. That may not sound like much, but it gives you time to set up tension and release; I find four-bar loops just breathe better.

Video and step-by-step instructions at O’Reilly Digital Media. Now, how can I do polyrhythms and larger phrase cycles? Hey, where’d everyone go?

Got other Kaossilator tricks? Let us know in comments.

Ed.: Okay, this isn’t necessarily helping Live shake its reputation as just this — a wonderland for glitchers. You really can make stuff that isn’t glitchy in Live, and that new compressor and mix engine sound fantastic. But you still have to glitch it out every now and then. It’s good, clean (erm, digitally dirty) fun. 4-bit 4ever. -PK