:: Hollow Earth Radio ::

ergh. i wanted to post a blog weekly, but things got away from me this past little while…mostly the mind f*ck of trying to figure out how reel-to-reel machines and recording works. spent hours online researching and on the phone talking to my brother (who almost knows what he’s talking about) and came up with some major epiphanies, all very erudite and prolly boring as hell to people who aren’t tapeheads or found sound junkies. but you are reading the hollow earth radio blog, so maybe they will pique your interest…

…like the difference between a 4-track recording and a 2-track recording. see this for full-color illustration. can you see how the same section of the tape gets covered for the 2-track (or, half track) mono ’side a’ as 2 of the 4-track (or, quarter track) stereo tracks? so, if you happen to be listening to a 4-track tape on a 2-track machine, you will hear them both at once. the weird part is the way that 4-track gets recorded. check this out.
1-Left Side A >>>>>>>>
2-Right Side B <<<<<<<
3-Right Side A >>>>>>>
4-Left Side B <<<<<<<
thats what the four tracks look like when you record in stereo using 2 tracks on each side. so, if tracks 1 and 3 are side A and 2 and 4 are side B, then when you listen to a 4-track recording on a 2-track machine you hear the left mono of side A playing forwards and the right mono of side B playing backwards. trippy. especially if the two sides are recorded at different speeds...i'll try to get that sound file up for you in the near future. its so good...

learning all this stuff and about what it means for archiving all these tapes is making me wish i had any idea what it was like to record on these old things. their old-school manual bits and bobs, bells and whistles are just starting to make sense to me, a child of the computer age. and they are so big, how did people lug them to the functions they wanted to record?
i wonder how it felt to have a library of these things, to pick one off the shelf to listen to one evening, to thread it onto the r2r player in your, what, living room? den? rec room? set up next to the record player in front of the wood paneled wall, across the room from the wet bar, the familiar path worn into the shag carpet from the scotch & soda to the kingston trio tape…yellow light on the avocado green easy chair and the rust red sofa, your suit jacket on the arm of your seat, your hand loosening your tie, your wife’s left pump dangling from her cross-legged foot, playing with her costume jewelry on her ear, at her neck…the clink of ice in your glasses, the hiss of tape and the crooning voice spelling out a homey evening in 1967…
sorry, i can’t help but time travel in my head when i look at these tapes. and now, figuring out what they sound like–utah state senate hearings, elaine’s birthday party, camp meetings–i trip backwards in time even more, tho the sound is always accompanied with an image in black & white like an old newsreel or nick-at-nite TV program. Sure, logically i know these people lived in color, but their lives weren’t recorded that way. everything looked like that movie, “good night and good luck,” right? even when i try to take pictures of what I’m working on–these reels, the machines they hook up to, everything comes out in shades of grey.