Where's Our Tape?

we're narrowly squeezing in on a roadblock with tape. some more background, a lot of people make records on computers these days, we're still all on tape. we have a lot of reasons, maybe we'll talk about them later, but it's how we do things. this is a little complicated because the last remaining analog tape manufacturer closed it's doors for restructuring in january, and since then tape's seen a classic supply and demand price jump. the plant is now on very limited production, so supply is scarce. most people selling new old stock tape on ebay or whatever for a lot more than what you would have paid a year or so ago. so what do we do? like the good hippies we are (just kidding, we're no stinking hippies) we recycle. or we buy used. since it's cheaper (and available) we're able to buy more reels to allow multiple takes of songs. we've ordered 6 reels of 3M 996 tape - which is the predecessor to quantegy GP9. this may all be totally boring, but they are high output tape, sometimes referred to as +9 tape (long of the short, back in the 50's/60's - your zero reference point was at 185 nWb/m a measure of fluxivity of the tape, sort of a saturation point. as tapes and machines got more evolved they could put more information on the tape, or had more headroom. your loudest parts could be louder than before, so the tape hiss is reduced in comparison, and there's more dynamic range. before i bore you any more, there's tons of info on this stuff here and here if you're into that sort of thing).

at any rate, we need tape to make the record. studio time has been booked for months and we can't just move it. we've ordered the tape, but it is not yet here. we leave tommorow. fedex had the shipment scheduled to arrive yesterday, but it did not. after about an hour of phone calls with fedex and instigating a "case" - we finally track down the packages of our reels at the wheeling sort office. the driver apparantly gave up delivering our packages - and at some point in champaign they lost the mailing labels. great. you can see the tracking results of our fiasco.

bill from tape tape is a wierd dude. he sounds exactly the "the dude" in the big lebowski on the phone. when i placed the order he sounded like he couldnt find the pencil and was scrambling to keep everything together. when i told him about our time crunch he said, "for an extra 10 bucks i can get in the van and drive through downtown LA traffic to get your package to fedex today" which i took him up on. at the end of our call he says with much enthusiasm (imagine "the dude" when he's talking about the nihlists, and say it in a stoner/surfer voice) "let's keep analog alive man!"