compasspnt wrote on Fri, 18 February 2005 16:53 |
Of course, this may be something people would rather not talk about, BUT...anyone got any stories?
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What a great topic, Terry! I know there are some juicy ones out there, so I'll tell mine in the hopes that everyone else will pipe up.
I was tape-op for a 3M M79 24-track on a jingle session - JCPenney, I think. If you remember the M79s, they had a peculiar tape path that kinda looped around in a U-shape -- erase and record heads on the left, vertical part of the "U" and the playback head on the right, vertical part. Capstan was center mounted with two pinch rollers and some kind of passive roller all the way at the bottom.
I was instructed, years before I could even TOUCH the machine, to always observe the tape path and make sure it is smooth as glass. A particular way of looking for wrinkles or un-even tension from reel to reel was to shine a light onto the back of the tape and look at the reflection of the light source. If it was reflected like a mirror, all good, if it "distorts" the image of the light source, there is uneven wear, improper tension - whatever, sometimes just built-up on rollers and/or heads.
On this session, while the tape was rolling (it was just a bunch of synths slaving to MTC on track 24), I was looking closely at the tape path, Maglight in hand, everything seemed ok on the erase/record side. As I was tilting my head over to the righthand headstack, I began to notice slight wrinkles in the take-up path. "That's strange," I thought, "the other side was perfect?!?"
It wasn't long before I felt the pull on my scalp, as my ponytail was being pulled through the pinch rollers at a blazing 30 inches per second. Yow!!
It didn't last long and I can't recall exactly, but I think my nose or cheek bone pressed the stop button as my face was being pulled toward the deck.
Besides my embarrassment, everything was OK. I had to have the engineer help unwind my hair and, of course, a good deck cleaning was in order. I'm so glad there were no camera phones in those days
We did get everything back in order and xfer the MIDI stuff to the machine, just before the vocal talent showed up. Of course, the composer and the enginner told the story for the rest of the afternoon to each and every overdub artist and every ad agency person that came through that day.
I keep my hair shorter these days, but I DO keep poking my head in those tape paths to make sure it is smooth as glass. I guess harddrive folks don't have these kind of "problems" these days. Aren't they lucky?
Osci-later,
Fig