A Tape Machine Was Always a Distortion Pedal
The VU meter on the eight-track in the corner of my old Burbank room lived permanently a hair into the red, because the assistant before me had decided that was where the tape sounded like a record and not a demo, and nobody since had touched the setting. Pushing the needle past zero was never a mistake on that machine. It was the whole job.
Tape saturation gets talked about like a mystery, a warmth you either have the ear for or don't, and it isn't one. Magnetic tape holds a signal as a pattern of tiny magnetized particles, and past a certain input level those particles simply run out of room to represent the wave accurately. The peaks get rounded off before the valleys do, which compresses the loud parts, and the rounding itself adds harmonics that weren't in the original signal. Turn the input up further and the rounding turns into outright clipping. A tape machine driven hard is not a clean recorder anymore. It is a distortion circuit that happens to also be a delay line.
Gearnews covered Strymon's new La Brea this week, a fully analog tape-drive pedal the company says can go from overdriven warmth to full-blown fuzz if you push it hard enough, built as a companion to their older Deco. That range, warmth at one end and fuzz at the other, is not two different features bolted together. It is one physical process — particles running out of headroom — with a single knob standing in for how far past the limit you decide to go.
I have not had a La Brea on my board yet, so I won't tell you what it sounds like, only what it is built to do, which the company's own description already gives away: the same behavior my old eight-track had, in a box that never needs splicing tape or a service tech who still remembers how the heads align.
What I liked about that Burbank room was never the tape hiss people romanticize. It was that the machine had exactly one honest opinion about how loud was too loud, and it told you by breaking, a little, in a way that sounded like a decision rather than a failure. A box that can do the same thing on a pedalboard is worth paying attention to, whenever I finally get a signal through one.
On the wire this week
Jonah Reyes was born in Daly City to Filipino parents, learned to solder before he learned to drive, and spent twelve years in Los Angeles rooms: a runner in Burbank, then an assistant, then mixing records nobody has heard of and a few everyone has. He now mixes from a small room in Echo Park and from whichever studio the work is in that month — Berlin, London, Tokyo, São Paulo — with one pair of monitors he trusts and a wall of pedals he does not need. He plays bass badly and on purpose. He will not write about a piece of gear he has not put a signal through.