HOME SYNC
by Edward Tatnall Canby
TRY IT YOURSELF! That is my first thought, each time a new basic category of hi-fi equipment hits our markets. Especially in my favorite area, intermediate semipro equipment that offers professional type sound and facilities in consumer sized and consumer-priced packages.
So when four-channel sync tape suddenly loomed up, this last year, I was vitally interested. That was for me. I had already started a project just waiting for it.
This kind of sync is that celebrated, lavishly costly and enormously bulky pro recording system known best to the public as "16-track," whereby recorded channels can be "laid down" on tape while others on the same tape play along, in strict real time, synced via playback through their recording heads. The finished music, or what have you, emerges step by step like a sort of collage, to take final form later via mixdown. The aesthetics of the medium are fascinating-for here there is no "original," no single live performance; and so a fundamental dogma of all past recorded art is challenged. There's not necessarily even one location; the tracks may be made anywhere, at any time, or erased and redone and usually are. Even the added ambience is synthetic, out of all time and place. Sync recording is very much the wave of the present, and probably the future, too, as it reaches into new areas, even including so-called classical music.
But, ingenious as they are, this is one area where our consumer tape recorders haven't been able to venture until now. Studio sync equipment, sixteen tracks, more or less, is simply unimaginable in any home, at any price. Reluctantly, we've had to settle for a bit of overdubbing here and there, plus separate record and playback for our two stereo channels, making possible some pretty good tape tricks, but not the real thing. Quadraphonic, however, has finally done it. You need four channels to play with. And if you're going to have four channels on home-feasible tape, you might just as well make them sync while you're at it-at least in the semi-pro area and along the fringes, where costs will allow the extra facilities. That's how it has happened.
TEAC's earlier four-channel recorder line, adapted from two-channel gear, had an add-on sync unit quite some time ago. This year, with second generation true four-way recorders coming on the market, the sync is built in permanently in several lines (starting out from Japan, of course) and without a doubt more are in the offing. It's a splendid idea for those who for one reason or another want to be their own sync artists. I grabbed at the lowest priced unit available, partly because they had one, partly because I was curious as to how inexpensively this new art could in fact be put to use in the home. It was the cheaper of two alternative TEAC models, the 2340, built compactly for seven-inch reels at home speeds, 7 1/2 and 3 3/4 ips.
(The larger unit takes ten-inchers and runs at 7 1/2 and 15.) Sony is also out with a sync recorder, fancier and, I would gather, aimed at a somewhat higher pro level-at higher cost. It, too, should be investigated in a hurry, if your cash supply is bigger.
Both these lines, and more to come, will give you the basic equipment to produce your own genuine "Sarge Pepper"--for wasn't that classic Beatle album done entirely via four-channel equipment? Something to imagine! So, instead of $50,000.00 and an acre of studio space, now I have a mere half a thou of equipment and I can carry it around the house without even straining a finger. The TEAC 2340 is, astonishingly, only about half the size of most semi-pro two-channel stereo recorders. And yet it will sync any combination of its four simultaneous tracks, record or play, and it has mixing and switching for eight inputs--four mics and four hi-level-with appropriate red-light indicators to tell you what's doing what. That's something. To be sure, it helps to have small fingers. And there are some basic and necessary problems in detail that have arisen in the paring-down from, say, $50,000.00 to a hundredth of that figure. But the absolute essentials are there. So-what to do with them? A VERY big question. I can hear dozens of readers muttering themselves out of this picture-OK, OK, for kids and rock freaks; but Sergeant Pepper! That ain't for me, buddy.
Well, that is why I am here. Since my age is approximately three times that of any known rock freak, I do not qualify. But I did put on a show, occupying me for many weeks out of two successive summers (I anticipated the sync recorder before there was such a thing), which made abundant use of the new machine, and I am forever sold on the whole system.
Marvelous! You can do anything. That is, once you teach yourself to operate no less than 16 separate volume controls plus a dozen-odd switchings all at once, making no mistakes.
So the first thing you do is just what you do when you buy your first new car. You go out and drive-at maybe five miles an hour. (Unless you're a hot car nut or something.) I spent a couple of days doing some very tentative "driving" and making an utter fool of myself most of the time. Not on my big show-that could wait. First thing I tried was a short anonymous sixteenth century choral work in four parts, designed originally for a Spanish cathedral, called Christus Natusest.
Christmas. I hooked in one mic, on one channel, and sang me the basso part. Then I went back and oops! Wrong switch.
After about 50 tries, I managed to get down, complete and in total sync, all four parts of this little piece, bass, tenor, alto and soprano. All produced, of course, by my own vocal cords.
Wow! The most awful sound you ever heard. You see, I can't sight-read music and twirl volume controls at the same time, especially when singing soprano. And my levels were all wrong, so I couldn't hear the other parts rightly in my phones, and thus I kept getting out of step and out of tune. I played the mess to some of my Canby Singers (who had sung the piece, very beautifully) and in two seconds they were rolling on the floor. There was a high note in the soprano part right at he end which I forgot about in my preoccupation with switching-until I got to it; so I let out a hideous yawp into the mic and almost succeeded.
That was the payoff. My falsetto is not of the best. So there's one thing you can do with sync.
My main project', once I learned TEAC's controls reasonably well (after all, there's a minimum that you have to have) was much more serious and it worked out a lot better. Another multi-media show-the last one, "Henry," having been done three years ago with two stereo recorders and two pairs of unconnected and un synced channels, playing approximately together. This one celebrated the 50th anniversary of a home community founded by my father and friends in 1922. My own movies, taken in the 1930s, were one visual element. Simultaneous relevant films taken recently went onto another projector, and color stills, including Kodachromes as far back as 1938 by me (earlier than that, they faded out to magenta) made up the third picture area. The photo continuity was to be accompanied by speaking voices-my part-plus appropriate music. Three speaking elements, 1, a narrator, reading in total darkness between major segments of the show--it turned out to be me; 2, taped "interviews" with inhabitants of the place, making relevant points to go with the pictures, and 3, spoken "quotes," from many sources, which generalized the idea of a living community, or commune-we lumped the two, though ours is a very sedate and conservative place, relatively speaking.
The taped narration was easy. I did it on my regular stereo recorder in a studio, a whole year before. Two takes of each segment, and that was that.
I'm pretty used to reading into microphones. I put it down mono, on both tracks, for flexibility in later use. We ended up dubbing it mono onto all four tracks of the sync recorder. A fine big effect, in the "darks," as we called them, which joined our picture segments together.
The taped interviews were a disaster.
I had warned-but to no avail. The interviewers made the classic mistake of using a portable cassette recorder with built-in mic, usually set up in a noisy living room and mostly with anywhere from three to a dozen people on hand-virtually all of them hopelessly off mic. You could transcribe some of the spontaneous comments, of course; they were good. Write them down. But my people wanted to use the originals! I did discover, interestingly, that the little machine recorded a much wider range than it could play back via its own head. When the cassettes were played through the fancy Advent 201 cassette deck, whole ranges of sibilant sss sounds came out, for a much improved intelligibility. We copied hours of interviews from the cassettes in this manner-and ended up using exactly two brief samples. Amplified through hall-sized speakers, the background noise and confusion was, as I knew it would be, simply horrendous. Take heed! You can improve a well recorded cassette sound if you play it via a quality narrow-gap head. But bad recording cannot be turned into good.
With this in mind, a whole year earlier, I had insisted that the third vocal element, the spoken "quotes," would be done right. These were to be read, by many different voices, and the idea was to pre-record them, then copy them off-later-onto the sync tracks. So I set up my equipment and for weeks I ran sessions under optimum conditions (optimum in terms of home use, with a good machine and a home soundproof studio). The people had to come to me; I didn't go out to them. They sat down in my studio chair, began to sweat and get scared, and then, hands shaking, the script rattling so they could scarcely see it, they would tremulously start in reading.
Amazing how most normal people are scared stiff of the friendly microphone-even a private one in a familiar home spot! They just go to pieces.
I spent most of my time joshing, reassuring, trying to banish that ole devil, stage fright, in its modern and totally irrational guise. Of course, a few of the people had done acting of one sort or another. Fatal. They think all the world's a stage, to quote Shakespeare, and they boom and blast into the mic, a few inches away, as though All Those People were out there in the thousands, hanging on every shout.
Ugh! Give me an amateur any day. I had a time, taming these boom-voices down to mic size.
I ended up, that summer, with about a half dozen 10 in. reels of tape filled with a hundred different voice recordings, all done mono on two stereo tracks at 71 ips. No Dolby was available, but the background sound was low-which was what I wanted. That allowed for free dubbing and large amplification, when the time came for the big show itself.
On an impulse, as a stunt, I did a practice job on a KLH Model Forty One stereo recorder-I created a vocal "fugue", using four or five different voices, speaking the same text. Only two channels, but the effect was-for my ear just terrific. Everybody talking at once, yet the overlapping entries of the text, beginning with the key words "Communes, then, are ... " gradually built up the sense in a way that seemed to me to be wholly modern and at the same time very much like the musical sense of an actual fugue lacking only the harmonic pitch relationship. (Even that was approximated, as the different voices entered at different speaking pitches, men and women.) I played this pseudo-synced vocal fugue at a public meeting where many of the people who had done the recordings were present. You can imagine their astonishment. Each of them had visited me in all privacy, made his or her recording, and had gone away not even knowing who else had been to visit, or was still to come. And here they all were, busily talking simultaneously, at least a dozen of them! The good thing was that every voice was doing its best to "project" as a solo, without any sonic competition; that was the studio condition as each original recording had been put down; and so their combined charisma, every one talking out his very best, was quite overpowering! Such is the force of the new medium, of which sync recording is the final fillip. I hadn't even got to that yet. But you can see how it was going to work out.
Indeed, I took the original of the fugue, a year later, and synced it neatly onto four channels, instead of two, via the TEAC 2340. This time, the fugued people were talking out of all the corners of the room. I didn't even have to re-do the job from the originals.
How come? One of the most splendid incidental facilities on the sync four-channel machine is its ability to take down a new recording without a beginning click or thump, soundlessly.
I know this is not exclusive to four channels. But with sync it is essential, because the essence of the whole technique is to be able to layer recordings in time, to lay them down, or remove them, right alongside other tracks.
Editing-out of clicks, etc. is not possible. You can't cut one track without cutting them all. If your new "layers" were to herald themselves with that old fashioned thump or click at each beginning, your entire scheme would be useless, and the same for endings.
On the TEAC 2340, then, you can add a new segment of sound on any individual track, or any combination, in sync with what is already present (which you can hear via sync playback), and there is not the slightest sound to indicate either beginning or ending of the new segment, other than the signal itself. See what I mean?
All I did, then, was to copy off each speaking voice onto the track of my choice, than reel back and begin again with another voice on another track.
Actually, since there were often two voices at a time on each track of the stereo (i.e. two-channel) version, I simply took both off together, channel for channel, and steered the pairs into various tracks on the TEAC. Since I had alternated from side to side in the stereo version, a voice to the right, then one to the left, this worked out just fine in four channels. The sync feature allowed me to bring each track segment in at precisely the instant I wanted it.
We could hardly do a show on speaking voices alone, for more than 50 minutes, so music became a prime consideration and it had to make use of all four channels, one way or another. I'll leave the mixing problem-four channels of music and four of voice-to another installment but suffice it to say that I found a way to do this, even without an outside mixer, right on the TEAC. My brightest idea was to use an SQ decoder to feed the four music channels. It worked both for quadraphonic SQ discs and, equally effectively, for standard stereo discs, spread out into four channels. Thus I could use my regular two-channel record player for all the music, starting with two channels-and an unlimited choice of records. A very workable procedure but not without its unexpected pitfalls. To my amazement, I somehow managed to end up with four-channel mono on about one fifth of the 50-minute show! I didn't even notice it, until I became aware that there was a lot of uncalled-for hum, on all four channels, and that the front right channel was low in level and hummed a bit worse than the others.
Guess what. You never could. I spent an entire evening, to two o'clock, trying to figure this one out, and ended up in despair. Nothing worked. The next day I took the entire system apart, unit by unit, testing selectively, and finally found it. One phono channel was dead, right at the source, at the base of the pickup arm! The SQ decoder, with its fancy cross phasing and divvying-up of signals, had thoroughly disguised this obvious trouble by feeding the remaining signal and the open-circuit hum into all of the four-channel outputs. Live and learn! Don't blame SQ. It wasn't designed to decode open circuits. But the very subtlety with which it redistributes the two input signals into four guarantees that any fault that occurs before decoding is going to be extremely well disguised in the four-way output. Same with other decoder matrices.
I am aware that for some of our professional readers this is all kindergarten stuff. Those who work in professional recording live with such problems day in and out on a much larger and more awful scale. But I figure that plenty more of our readers who don't happen to frequent the 16-track studios may never have had a chance even to look at those enormous mixing consoles and the huge, fat reels of tape that are common-place in such establishments. The important thing is, a small corner of that audio territory has now extended into home equipment, and I am out to celebrate it. The home semi-pro operation is but a smaller facsimile of the larger one. And, dare I say it, even the pros, God bless 'em, make fool mistakes once in awhile, just like me. We all live in the same audio world. I will retail more of my sync experience in another installment.
(Audio magazine, Feb. 1973; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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