A Tape Machine Was Always a Distortion Pedal
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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.
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.