Reel to Reel

[fese]

Okay so i managed to pick up a tascam 4 track.

Now I would like to know if anyone could point me in the right direction for some tuts on how to use them effectively and get the effects I want to get

Cheers

Just plug in and record. Make a song just with 4 tracks. The best thing about the tascam is that you are limited and have to work around it. And you don't have to spend hours on mixing because with just the four tracks your song is unlikely to be cluttered with lots of overlapping frequencies.
I should do it again, too, I still have my old portastudio from the days of yore... Damn laziness.

[kritikon]

Now I would like to know if anyone could point me in the right direction for some tuts on how to use them effectively and get the effects I want to get

I quite liked slowing down cassettes - if you play drumtracks with the drums all pitched up a few notes, faster tempo than you want, then record with lashings of a good reverb (not too long a tail) then play it back on slower speed and it can sound very good. Shit reverb will still sound shit slowed down, but decent impulses from the better known plates for example will sound more like halls at the slower speed, but really rich. For it to sound good, you have to try to record it as clean and pure as you can though. Which is not that easy on bog standard cassette 4 tracks. Because they weren't that good mostly.

I think you may have rushed out a bit too early - good reel to reel saturation can sound good, but then they were far better than cassettes. A top end cassette can sound very good on drums if saturated, but your average cassettes just don't play back well enough for it to be useful generally (IMO). I've had some superb drumtracks from a studio Nakamichi, but anything I tried at home wasn't a patch - and I bought reasonably expensive cassette players, and good quality cassettes.

I suspect the effect you're most after is tape saturation. In which case you simply record with the red lights peaking often. The more you peak, the more you saturate. Beware that for recording that back into a DAW is fraught with problems. Firstly you're almost by default going to have to noise gate it, because cassettes are horribly noisy compared to anything modern. Secondly and often even more importantly - your speed will likely waver. It may be useable, but if you're used to strict tempos for modern DAW electronic dance stuff, the timing may make it impossible.

I have used some old cassette recordings in my DAWs in the past, but the only way I could get it useful was to break it down into bar sized pieces, and it absolutely had to be chopped to size carefully and edited arduously. If you want to record a swathe of bars of music and get it to fit with a DAW project en masse - forget it.

Cassettes are very LowFi in general. I suspect you'll be a little disheartened by how LowFi...

Wow and flutter is not a musically useful effect. Saturation is useful, but only for recording whole busses or whole songs, not IMO worth the hassle for individual sounds.

I suppose one effect that occasionally you might like is to record with Dolby on and playback with it off, or vice versa - depending on the Dolby type, it can make things a little brighter and crunchier but also noisier. I only ever really liked Dobly S, and it's not what you'd call pro quality...

[Kaboom75]

Slate Digital VTM is probably the best tape sim there is.

[CC4]

Okay so i managed to pick up a tascam 4 track.

Now I would like to know if anyone could point me in the right direction for some tuts on how to use them effectively and get the effects I want to get

Cheers

What exactly do you want to do? Twenty or so years ago I had some fun with reel-to-reel machines. Essentially I recorded various sounds onto some tape (mostly my voice because that's all I had at the time). Then I took segments of the audio, chopped the recording up with a razor blade, reversed some of the clips, spliced them back together with some tape, and would make it into a loop. Then I'd play the loop back on the reel-to-reel, recorded the results on something else, and called it "experimental music." I suppose at the time I was inspired a bit by Steve Reich.

[deastman]

Wow and flutter is not a musically useful effect.

You're obviously not a fan of Boards of Canada.