Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

This is sort of momentous: the last audio tape factory in the US has closed up shop and the company, Quantegy/Ampex has filed for bankrupcy.

Wow. That’s sort of sad. I’m pretty sure some of the first studio recordings I ever did were on Ampex tape, and the last time I used tape was 1995. I wonder where those tapes are now.

I wonder how many reels of audio tape it would take to hold all the songs and demos I’ve recorded on Lucy (my main recording computer). The fact that you don’t need tape to do quality recordings anymore has really helped people like me. I mean, I have no space to store reels of tape, or the machines needed to record on tape. Stuff that used to be difficult — splicing, crossfades, backwards tracking (like the electric guitars on Stay The Same) — are now done with a few keystokes. And I really, really like not having to rewind.

I was once told that languishing on a shelf in Cleveland’s Right Track studios are the original tapes of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, and if you knew the right people, you could cue them up and play with them. Urban legend? Maybe.