How to Use the Front Panel of a Tape Machine

Video Transcript

For Expert Village, I'm Kurt Glaser, Chief Engineer at KGB Studios. Welcome to the second session on "How to use a Reel to Reel Tape Recorder". This session we'll go into quite a bit of detail on everything on the front panel of the stereo reel to reel tape deck. So let's get right into that right now. Let's go through the basic functions on the deck starting from the top down on this reel to reel. Up over here, right in the middle, you can see right there in the middle of the screen, that's the tape counter, and that's for measuring, it's not a real accurate way to measure the device, but it does give you some sort of help in terms of locating what goes on these tapes. And these are the reels, this is the left reel, this one right here is the left reel, followed by this one over here which is the right reel. Down over here, this switch right here, is the tape speed switch. You can set it at 3 3/4" per second, or at the more dynamic and better for live recordings, 7 1/2" per second, or "IPS". This piece here is the head which we will go into a little bit further, and we'll talk about these other devices over here. This piece over here, the multi-synch is a real important piece which we'll talk about when we get into the live recording. These are the basic function switches, fast forward, stop, record, etc. And you can actually record one track at a time on a four track that separates from what the other types of decks you can use. This sets the type of taping device, whether high or low bias. Power and pause of course, obvious connections there. Down over here in the bottom left hand corner, these are the devices for the microphone is set here on the outside, and on the inside you have this dual function knob where you have the mic here, or the line, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Headphones for front and back, stereo of course, and these are called the volume unit meters or "VU" meters, right here and of course there are, of course, four of those. This is where you plug your microphones in. We'll talk about that again in a little more detail when we get into the deeper functions. And this tells you which ones you can monitor. So if you're listening to record you'll be on particular channels. And then far over here to the far right, on the bottom, this is the volume controls on each of the stereo channels. And down over here we have the "sound on sound" which is the "SOS", sound on sound, or the "Echo" device, and you can control the amount with this control here. Very interesting device. So that is the unit itself, that's the functions, the basic functions of a four track reel to reel tape deck.

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