If you have VHS tapes you should try this

Howdy! Today my friend @DavidHilowitzMusic and I wanted to experiment with an idea that's been stuck in our heads for weeks.

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[VenusTheory]

It only took David and I about a year and a half to make this collab happen, hope it was worth the wait! 😅

[rayderrich]

You explaining the workings of video tape made me feel rather old but also it brought smiles to my face for the great memories. Thank you Cameron.

[brianrandleas]

Back in the 80s and 90s before we had digital recorders I used 2 vhs decks for recording and overdubbing. It was cheaper than reel to reel decks which were the goto at the time. They worked great and I kept them in use until digital recorders and computers surpassed them. Loved this video. Thank you!

[kabirchoudhary]

I've realised that it has become ritual for me to watch one of your videos before working on my own music. Not as musical inspiration but in a weird way of being inspired where I feel more free from the boxes I've put myself into while creating. It feels insane but i'm writing this so this feel stays fresh in my memory.
Thank you Cameron.

[Usul]

I worked in a studio in the 90s that switched from an 8-track reel-to-reel over to an early 16 track Alesis ADAT system (later 32 tracks) using S-VHS media. The ADATs used regular VHS transports. Prior to working at the studio I was as an intern/student technician in a shop repairing VCRs all day. Sounds like your dad did something similar. The skills served us well in the studio keeping the ADATs humming along as the internals were very similar to VCRs. Pretty cool to see people get excited about tape and the 90s sound again. Hard nostalgic vibes from 90s synth sounds with all the hiss and hands-on joy that comes with working with tape. Thanks for sharing.

[DJPenguino]

Back in the mid-late 1990's, I used a HI-FI VHS deck to record some of my dj mixes before dubbing them over to cassettes. With a T-120 tape, that's good for up to a 2 hour dj mix. I didn't use the EP speed because one time I recorded one set off of radio at EP speed and the audio kept dropping out every 4-5 seconds (dodgy tape). So henceforth, I used the SP speed.
Also with VHS, there are 2 types of audio tracks. 1 is "linear" and it is the original audio track. It's fidelity was basically equal to a type 1 cassette tape without Dolby B NR. 2. Then came "Hi-Fi" which used FM technology to record the audio. The S/N ratio was around 80 dB and the frequency response was a lot closer to 20-20KHz than with the linear audio which was more or less 60Hz to 8KHz.

[jackstone]

Oh, this had to have been so fun to do. Sent me back to my childhood in the 90s. Thank you for that, sir. ❤ This is one of your best videos so far. Your grumpy shell is totally dissolved here. Such positive vibe, throughout.

[MathHammer]

Earlier Hi-Fi VCRs were a big deal for audiophiles in my later high school and early college years (early 1980's). I worked for 3M from 1990-2016 (first two years as a sponsored postdoc) and up until the Imation spin-off worked on various magnetic recording technologies, primarily computer tape but also some AV tape. The science and engineering in the magnetic recording field was impressive and interesting.

[lemonberries]

A friend of mine went off the deep with VCR and tape. He got me out of hardware, and into DAW life, then 180ed hard into hardware himself for years, owning 4-5 VCRs, synths and MPC's

[wrmusic]

That oldschool lo fi is the reason I love my Akai S900. Magic happens when you drive the input just so so into the red. No VST bitcrusher/saturator can quite get you there.

[PetrKulda]

SP is standard play-mode, LP is long play mode. Tape moves slower in LP mode. It results in lesser quality, but longer record time. Faster moving tape = better quality.

[vincentlemineur]

Technic, art, poetry, philosophy...Uplifting, as usual! Thanks & cheers from Belgium! 🤝

[dokma_eu]

I might be wrong, but to me it seems like you have recorded your sounds in VHS HiFi Stereo mode (which sound like a high-quality DAT recording because it uses technology very similar to DAT, which has much wider dynamics and freq range than normal VHS audio!), while David recorded his sounds on plain VHS audio channel, which is "true" analog tape recording (VHS HiFi is completely different and would not produce desired LoFi sounds but rather very high quality sound). I used VHS HiFi sound at LP speed for mastering my demo album mixes and archiving CDs and tapes to VHS back in early 90s since I could have 8 hours of CD/DAT-quality on one 4-hour VHS tape. I am just guessing that's where your LoFi sound differs so much from David's since his VHS machine has only 1 mono analog audio track (see his white and yellow connector in his YT? white is audio, yellow is composite video), and your VHS recorder has both L+R stereo channels in HiFi mode. Ah yes, I enjoyed that part where you taped the plastic bit to enable recording ;). Check if my theory is correct, Cameron - and let us know.

[GerenM]

I also left a comment on David's video, but wanted to leave you a note, too. Great project. As I mentioned on David's channel, I'm not really a LoFi guy, but the library the two of you have created is wonderful -- perfect for tones to float through an ambient piece, or even as featured parts in more ... "normal" ... music. Thanks to both of you!

[autofox]

VHS tapes and video tape in general have been used for pure sound recording for a _long_ time, actually. Back in the late '70s, the first home PCM adapters used composite video to output their recordings to a VCR; if you wanted to listen to a PCM recording, you popped the tape into the VCR, turned on the PCM adapter, and pressed play while running the VCR's output back into the adapter. If you watch the output on a TV - because it _is_ just a video signal - it looks like a mess of black and white pixels, but a PCM adapter would decode it; sample rate was around 14 bit, not quite Red Book CD but still pretty darn good for the time. Before the advent of CDs in 1982, this was the only way to listen to digital audio at home.

Also, in the '90s, there was a standard called ADAT which debuted in 1992. ADAT used S-VHS tapes, a higher-resolution version of VHS which debuted in the late '80s, and could record 8-channel 16-bit audio; multiple ADAT VCRs could be linked together to record up to 128 channels simultaneously. ADAT was used for professional audio mastering in many studios up into the 2000s.

[donaldpriola]

I used to use VHS hi-fi for audio recordings; they are quite good for audio in two hour mode; far better than cassettes (tracking aside). Audiophiles back in the day used them all the time for vinyl recordings. Still have mine, and they sound great.

[docmojoman]

I used to drag my mid/hi end consumer level hifi vhs vcr with me to NYC to record BLS and RKS fm stations that featured live djs like Red Alert and Tony Humphries back in the day. I preferred to record at regular speed, but sometimes I had to go out so in order to get the entire evening I'd set it to record on slow!
My machine did have a way to set input levels. It also had a set of level meters. At the time, I was under the assumption that the quality was between cassette and reel to reel.

[iamNOUKN]

In 1986, I did an internship at Universal Recording in Chicago in the film sound division downstairs. One of the machine room operators (more on that later) would take out a certain VHS deck and a portable PCM converter box and record sound FX after work. The results were fed into the Synclavier studio upstairs.
You should look at a Magna-tech recorder 35mm film recorder. Usually a full stripe setup with a thick magnetic layer on top of a 35mm acetate base instead of film emulsion. The magnetic layer was so thick that it had tons of headroom. Gunshots recorded on this stuff sounded amazing! Our machine room was stuffed to the rafters with these Magna-Tech machines.

[lazygazzzer]

About the tab on the edge of the cartridge. Back in the day they did genuinely used to tell you to snap out the tab after making a recording. This would cause a lever in the machine to push forward and lock-up the tape erase head - it was an actual mechanical block to protect the tape. And then if you wanted to overwrite the tape again the advice on the box was to use a piece of sticky tape to cover-over the hole. So what you are doing on those pre-recorded tapes is 100% correct when you want to record over them.

[chrisbraddock]

Cassette tapes used the same tab protectors to prevent accidental recording. A piece of tape over gap can enable recording.