Ping Pong: 4-Track Reel to Reel Tape Recorder

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Kurt Glaser at KGB Studios Seattle. Today, we're talking about pinging. What is pinging? It's pinging from two channels in the front and pinging them and adding them to two channels in the rear part or the last two channels of a 4-track reel to reel recorder. How do you do that, you say? Because you save an extra two tracks, an extra two tracks, so you get a total of six tracks of really clean audio on an analog tape. How do you do that, you ask? Let me show you. Okay, well what we're going need to do is show you first of all in the front how we do it. We have some things to modify in the back as well. But, first of all, we're going to take the microphones out. Now these outer circles, as you can see, if you can get in here. These are outer circles and inner circles. This is microphone and this is line. We're actually going to be inputting a line circuit. So we're going to match these at this little marker right here where my fingernail is, if we can see that. Okay? The next thing is we're going to be monitoring the rear channel, so we have the headphones in the rear channel. And we're going to be recording both tracks, because we're going to take the two front tracks here and we're going to put those over here to the rear tracks. So we're going to record both of these tracks now at the same time. And we won't need any of the synchronizational switches, so we're going to switch those down. And then the other got you is, we're going to need to monitor the back two channels. And, of course, then these are the output volumes for the fronts and we'll just have everything in the back. So the biggest difference is you're going line over here, no microphones, none, none of those, but the lines. And you're going to be recording two tracks, two tracks, instead of one track. Now, we'll show you what goes on in the back. In the back, the line outs, these guys here, are going outputs and we got a new piece of gear, that we're going to show you. It's as simple as that. So the line outputs coming from the front are going to out to actually an input into our mixing console. That's what this is. This is Houston Control here or space control. This is where the channels can be mixed and so we have two inputs coming from the output of our deck, going into two inputs in our mixer. And then, we're going to add the percussion track right here with the microphone. And this will now add our bass, percussion and two guitars onto two tracks alone. So, we'll have two tracks alone going into and we'll still have two tracks, count them, two tracks to go that are completely clear that we can add vocals and leads, strings, other things on that as well. So that's how you set up the ping and your ping ponging, as they say. The downside is that you've got added noise on the rear tracks from the front tracks. But the upside is you get two more tracks. So with that, that's how you do pinging. Here at Expert Village, KGB Studios, join us next time.

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