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Question for tape delay design
sahko123:
thanks for reading this,
I'm designing a tape delay for an fx rack and i have two questions i have a tape player that ive mostly dismantled. Can cassette erase heads work as mono recording heads if re-wired with the appropriate circuitry installed. and what voltages for the signal and bias would be appropriate for the use.
Le_Bassiste:
nice project idea and simple answer: no. tape erasure is accomplished with high frequency magnetic fields generated by the erase head. thus, the erase head is simply too small to deliver a useful frequency response in the audio range. so, in practice, you need at least a 3-head tape deck for your project. with that setup, you will of course have to make the tape speed variable in order to get different "room sizes", i.e., different delay times.
in the good old analog times, there were also designs that used multiple playback heads for even fancier delay effects. irc, the WEM copicat had quite a fan base with fender rhodes piano players, albeit utterly noisy.
http://www.vintagehofner.co.uk/britamps/watkins/copicat/copi8.html
edit: on the "spectrum" album by billy cobham, the track "snoopy's search" has a guitar solo by marc bolan, where he uses slapback echoes, causing a huge "hiss" on the recording. that's how the copicats sounded.
hth!
dmills:
Also replay heads have a really small gap, where record heads, not so much (the recording is defined by the tape passing under the trailing edge of the gap, while the playback is in effect integrating the flux in the gap hence different designs)...
Regards, Dan.
sahko123:
So in other words I'd need a different tape head. Which means I'd probably have to frankenstein one in
Le_Bassiste:
here's a picture of a 3-head arrangement in a stereo cassette player. note that record- and playback-head are combined into a single head unit that has two prominent "bulges".
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