This post will encounter my thoughts and experiences with working with tape and comparing that to digitally based recording.
My first ever experience with recording music was with a Tascam 244 cassette tape recorder. This was a purchase I made on reverb.com reading about all the cool things you could do with tape. When I first bought the machine only then did, I realise, oh crap, no one makes cassette tapes anymore. So, there I went to the dark depths of eBay in search of the ever so rare and elusive blank cassette tape. When I got the tapes, I began playing around with the recorder, just recording covers of songs I knew at the time. I began to fall in love with the whole recording thing just from that experience alone.
I then downloaded pro tools first and realised, oh ok so this is why no one bothers to record to tape anymore. You can get all the good parts of having a tape-recorded production and so much more.
So, tape vs. Digital based recording where does each end really hold up?
Let’s start with tape. Tape has a long shelf life if stored correctly and will be compatible on most machines well into the future thus verifying the longevity of a recording.
Digital on the other hand, with the ever-evolving updates and hardware upgrades who knows when one day if you need to playback a recording from 30 years ago if you’ll be able to do this easily on the machines of the future.
But on the contrary, digital does hold up in every other aspect: consistency, user friendliness, quality, flexibility; these are just a mere few qualities where digital studio set ups supersede an analogue based recording.
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