luka
Well-known member
The tape would be rocked back and forth over the tape head to find the precise edit point, which would be marked with a white pencil. The tape would then be released from the machine heads and then run through an editing block which would hold it in place and allow it to be sliced by a razor which would be guided by a perpendicular groove. This isolated piece would then be spliced together with another piece of tape and this process would be repeated over and over, resulting in the final “edit.”
Most of the records that were edited were produced with a sequencer on a fixed tempo grid, so an editor would have to make sure the tempo of his edits matched it. The start of a single bar would be marked on the tape and the distance to the next marked bar would be measured. Using a calculator, the distance in millimeters for 1/4 notes, 1/8 notes and 1/16 notes could be determined. This process, also known as “bullet editing,” was incredibly time-consuming and involved a great deal of imagination. Hearing a new edit, the way it distorted time, was thrilling. Watching these edits play on a reel-to-reel machine, with the myriad of taped-together sections flying by one after the other over the tape heads, was spectacular.
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