Burying mics and tapes

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MaurinhoDUB)))
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Burying mics and tapes

Post by MaurinhoDUB))) » Sat Jan 02, 2010 12:56 am

Hello everyone!

I was reading some topics around here and in other sites
about burying mics and master tapes.I've wanted to know if someone already did this and what was the results!
I'm using two 1/4 machines and two samson Q7...
if I bury whould it damage the tapes or the mics?

big up from brazil!

unityunityunity
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Post by unityunityunity » Sat Jan 02, 2010 4:24 am

yeah i read it too..
i don't have a reel to reel but i wan just gunna try it with a regular cassette version and let it sit in the earth for some time..

i'd say go for it...but maybe not with your mics...i think the last thing id wanna do is bury my mics..

i'm curious if anyone's done it yet ... I'd love to here the before and after.

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JahNice
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Post by JahNice » Sat Jan 02, 2010 5:13 pm

Hey i've not heard about burying mics, what is the effect supposed to be?????? how you bury it?? just like it is with no box??????????? insane idea.... absurd... why do you want to do that???? I only heard that lee perry used to bury some mastertapes, so they dont get stolen..

unityunityunity
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Post by unityunityunity » Sat Jan 02, 2010 6:14 pm

bury the tape...
it rains...snows...it'll warp...get all the dirt out of it and play it back.


yup.

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MaurinhoDUB)))
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Post by MaurinhoDUB))) » Sat Jan 02, 2010 7:55 pm

hmm thx for the reply guys!
but i was thinking...if you're gunna bury any thing you should put it in a plastic bag right?like to protect from dirt and water?
the guitarist in my band told me that they bury tapes to improove the low frequencies but...i dunno i think im gunna do a test!

here in brazil some people when planting ganja put buds in a plastic bag and bury them for a couple of weeks cuz the dirt aplies pressure on the buds pumping its potence...
think is gunna have the same efect?hehe!

big up from brazil!

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Neil C
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Post by Neil C » Sat Jan 02, 2010 10:57 pm

This has got to be one of the weirdest threads I've ever seen. I thought the title was a mistype.
Perry had a thing for burying stuff. When he was staying with Adrian Sherwood, Adrian came back one day to find that Perry had buried Sherwood's expensive brand new TV in the back garden.

I suppose it's possible the low frequencies might be emphasised, but only I think because the high frequencies might be degraded.

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Post by Zutao » Sun Mar 21, 2010 4:56 pm

Some good thinking here on this thread.. The way I see it, there are 3 important forces that might act on the buried tape:

1) Subjection to higher and more constant humidity (moisture and temperature insulation) than in a surface environment;
2) Strongest magnetic force on the tape becomes the earth's magnetic field, which is more or less monodirectional compared to manmade sources of magnetic force;
3) A different rate of oxidation (given that the signal on the tape itself is physically rust, this is probably the most important factor).

All 'effects' are a form of signal degradation, so the most important criteria here are:

1) Does the burying of the tape result in an audible level of signal degradation (given that the surface of most of the tape is coiled and not directly exposed to the elements)?
and;
2) Is any resulting audible degradation considered subjectively desirable?

All of these quantitative considerations can be measured and assessed. However, the remote possibility exists that there is an unknown exponent in this practice of burying the tape. It does seem to bring to a head the philosopher's question: 'If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?'
We might well ask: 'If Lee Perry made a riddim in the studio when there was nobody else around, decided to bury it in his garden among the weeds at night, and forgot all about it the next day, does that riddim exist?'
In a real sense, the riddim may exist despite that he forgot it (maybe it's still there?), as the electrical patterns in his brain when he made this riddim will have made up a part of what we know as 'Lee Perry'. For example, photographs of a man mixing dubs at the Black Ark studio may exist today, but that man does not, although we call a certain entity 'Lee Perry'. This is because not a single atom in the entity we call Lee Perry today was around in 1970s Jamaica. He has completely recycled, as have we all after 12 years or so, all the atoms in his body. We have simply given a name to a set of brain 'programs', and this software is the accumulation of experience (experience that may or may not include the production of a riddim he has forgotten about and which nobody else knows about).
Quantum mechanics makes this situation even more curious. This field of science predicts to a very high degree of accuracy the position of sub-atomic units of material energy, using wave functions. The implications are, among other things, that a subatomic unit may exist in more places than one. And when we look at the what a dub tape actually is, it is a wave-function written on rust. By this standard, it's arguably a self-referential material entity and the dub can be said to 'exist' whether it's above or below the surface of the earth. :-?

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