Barton Carroll and producer/engineer Graig Markel set out to record Carroll's 2009 album, Together, You and I, entirely to a Tascam 34 4-track tape machine. Carroll, who has toured and recorded extensively with Eric Bachmann's Crooked Fingers, is a studio specialist and a fan of folk and jazz from the World War II era to the late '60s. Together, You and I, needed a classic organic sound that only tape could provide. But as time, budget, and the process wore on, he and Markel discovered how hard it is to stay out of the box these days. Together, You and I is a confessional of lost love, found love, and yearning. It's folk music, plain and simple, that cuts a frayed swath from open fields to lonely bar rooms.

Why did you and Carroll decide to record to tape? 

Barton is a storyteller with an affinity for writing songs that are tributes to a particular era. He is a stickler for detail and wanted to stay true to that older '60s folk and jazz sound, which comes from tape. Also, with recording to tape, you are able to capture the actual performance of the musicians playing together rather than building them through Pro Tools editing. These songs were played all the way through. We had upright bass right next to drums in the same room. There's bleed and feel, and that's what Barton wanted. A real sense of his song writing comes through. 

Did you use Pro Tools at all for Together, You, and I? 

Yes. We used Pro Tools to monitor both input and playback from tape. I routed the four output channels of the 4-track into four inputs of the Pro Tools Digi 002 hardware. I set up four empty tracks in Pro Tools and armed them as needed to use for monitoring tape. As we filled up tracks on the tape machine, we dumped them into Pro Tools and synced them with previous tracks we dumped. We'd make a reference track, dump back to tape, record three more tracks on tape, and repeat the process. Any tracks that we had built up and synced in Pro Tools were bypassed, because we were compiling them to be mixed later. We only tracked to the one reference track from tape, and three empty tracks on the tape machine. 

What did you designate the initial four tracks four? 

For the first series of takes it was drums, bass, and a click or scratch. One mic on the kick, one on the snare, one for the stand up bass, and one for scratch guitar or click. Some additional scratches such as vocals sometimes went to Pro Tools. Other scenarios were three mics on drums and one on bass, or two on drums and two on bass, scratches going directly into Pro Tools. We recorded them all together in a small room, with plenty of glorious bleed. Most of the background vocals were recorded together as well. 

How was it working with the Tascam 34 tape machine? 

The tape sounds are so warm and deep, especially the acoustic guitars. There's no better compressor than tape. I hardly compressed anything during tracking. The tape just gives you this magical marring quality that's nicely compressed yet very subtle. 

What proved to be the biggest challenge with working to tape? 

Syncing. Syncing was incredibly hard to do. The tape deck plays back at slightly varying speeds, depending on where you are on the reel and possibly voltage fluctuations. The variance of speed was never enough to noticeably affect pitch, but it gradually slides out of sync throughout the song. It took three or four times of tweaking tape speed to get it in sync. I eventually just started manually nudging tracks when they slid out of sync. I was apprehensive to do this at first, because one of our goals was no Pro Tools editing. But there was a schedule we needed to stick to. We only had 10 days to do all the recording. Barton had musicians and vocalists coming in from out of town and I didn't want to waste time. I was rushed trying to keep everything moving along, so I made some exceptions. 

As the producer and engineer you were feeling the pressure? 

Definitely. I didn't want to waste Barton's money. The computer sitting in front of us started looking more and more attractive. It was amazingly difficult to not cave in and just do it in Pro Tools. We'd ask ourselves, "Are we really going to keep doing this?" Eventually, we found out little tricks that would improve us being productive, like hunting around on tapes to find open tracks on songs to keep the tracking process going. When we ran out of tracks I'd tell them to go get lunch. Then I'd bounce it to Pro Tools. Sometimes I'd need a couple extra hours at the end of the day to complete the bouncing. 

Was Barton angry at you for sneaking to Pro Tools for the nudging? 

No. As a matter of fact, we used plug-ins while me mixed. I did try to use as much outboard gear as possible though. 

How does working with tape differ than working with Pro Tools? 

It's funny, when recording with Pro Tools, you take for granted that people can come into a session and not know the song, and sometimes not be that great of a player. It's much more difficult to do that with tape. There is no nudging around a bad performance, or copying and pasting a vocal performance that might not happen again, loop recording, etc. 

So tape vs. digital? Which do you like? 

Recording Barton's album to tape made me appreciate both formats. The best possible world is having both. Having that classic compressed tape sound, with the ability to chop, slice, and dice. 

How does mixing from (with) tape differ? 

The EQ is much different. I spend a lot of time tweaking things 10 kHz up in Pro Tools. I usually end up with these radical EQ boosts of 10 or 15 dB. On tape, anything 5 kHz and up is very present, and just two or three dB makes a huge difference. Even though you can't hear it, there's a lot of stuff going on above 20 kHz. Tape captures this, interacts with frequencies that are audible, and creates a timbre and richness in high end frequencies that digital doesn't produce. 

How did you deal with tape hiss? 

Once the tracks were in Pro Tools, we'd send them back out to tape again. I was worried about tape noise. I overcame a lot of the tape hiss issues by hitting as hard as I possibly could to tape. There were many occasions where I would ask to re-track a performance, saying, "That was a great performance, but I think we can hit the tape a little harder." Actually, I think we did well with the signal to noise ratio, considering we used a deck aligned for [Ampex] 456 tape. I used [Ampex] 499 tape and hit it as hard as I could. The end result of doing this is a little brighter playback.

And mastering? 

Martin Feveyear mastered it for digital. He's worked with Mark Lanegan, Damien Jurado and John Wesley Harding. Martin is an audio guru. I did the mastering for vinyl, which was all done in the computer. Someday maybe I will be an audio guru. 

What was the benefit of working with your minimal 4-track tape method? 

With the help of Pro Tools, I was basically able to get 16 to 24 tracks on a professional tape format for fairly cheap. If you break it down, four tracks on 1/4" tape equals 16 tracks on 1" tape. I was able to use four of the best compressors on Earth for roughly $100 per channel. It gave us the feel of a classic recording. That's what we're all looking for, right?