Analog Machine Problems... help please

Posted on Sep 09, 2004 11:09 am
Karetaker
Member Since: Dec 23, 2003

I have a Tascam 38 eight track reel to reel. Last night I was trying to lay down a click track for a song we are recording. The metronome has a kind of doot, doot, high kind of pitch to it. The first problem I had was I couldn't get enough singnal on the VU on the reel. The signal to the board was hot enough.... reading quit nice on the meter bridge. I tried laying it down. On playback it didn't have a nice high doot, doot,... It sounded like a muddy kick with no click in it. I tried it on another track and just recorded a small section. It had a doot, doot, sound to it so I layed it down on that track. On play back I had the same muddy sound. I keep the thing very clean. I clean the WHOLE tape path before, and after each secion. If we take a break I rewind the tape and clean it then as well. I degmagnitize the whole tape path regularly. I rewound the tape to clean the heads again just to be on the safe side. They were clean enough to lick. I cleaned the whole tape path. I pulled up the one tesion roller that spins the capstan for cleaning of the capstan. It was turning my swabs black. Very strange indeed. Swab, after swab it just wouldn't come clean. I noticed that I was dripping some cleaner on the pinch roller. When I touched the pinch roller it was a sticky goo. I have another pinch roller but didn't have it there. Needless to say that ended the sesion for the night. The one thing that left me puzzled is my lack of input to the VU meter on an idle machine. I did a demo for a band a few months ago on the machine and it came out beautiful. I did some small recording stuff in between with no probems. Now this, I'm not sure what's going on.

That was one problem. To begin the night I hit the play button and some previously recorded music started playing. The machine started slowing down to the point I thought it was going to stop. I reached up to turn it a little by hand to make sure there wasn't any unusual drag on it. It felt fine and spun freely. I stopped it before anything bad happened. I let it sit idle for a while and then tried it again. It worked after that, but did repeat this again. With a rewind and a FF it seemed fine after that. I listened to a piece of the previously recorded material and it sounded fine. I don't have a sesion again until Tuesday. I think I'm going to pick it up and bring back to my shop.... tear the thing apart and give it a good cleaning inside. Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

BTW.... please spare me the "Buy digital and you won't have this problem" commentary.... Thank You...hehehe

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