Awesome tape deck pitch control tip!

[SebP]

Something that I didn't know and wish I would've known before is that tape decks have little screws inside to adjust the pitch! I've been using a small hand-held voice recorder with 3 speeds for a while now but it's mono. Until yesterday, when I found out that tape decks have screws that can be used to adjust different things. I looked into 2 tape decks, a cheap one, that has only one screw for the pitch and a better Pioneer one(from the 90's, those black ones), that has pan controls, bias control and one x1 pitch and one fine tune pitch screws! I guess a lot of you knew that already but if you didn't, open your tape deck and find a screw close to the motor. It's a metal screw with a flat/phillips head, sometimes it says "pitch adjust" on the circuit board. The best is to record at the fastest speed to get a wider speed range. You can pitch low enough. keep on rocking those dirty beats!

And btw, to be able to control bias is almost like being able to control saturation. It makes the sound really clear. Like it says here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_bias "AC bias is the addition of an inaudible high-frequency signal (generally from 40 to 150 kHz) to the audio signal. Magnetic tape has a nonlinear response at low signal strengths, as measured by its coercivity. Bias increases the signal quality of most audio recordings significantly by pushing the signal into the linear zone of the tape's transfer function."

[kel]

Nice! How far can you pitch? Are we talking a few semitones or a few octaves?

[Mr. Davenport]

That is exciting news for sure. My friend has an OLD ass tape deck like one that an elementary school would have in the 1960's or something that has a pitch control like a volume knob. You can really adjust the pitch quite easily.

[SebP]

Nice! How far can you pitch? Are we talking a few semitones or a few octaves?

I would say 4-5 semitones. It's impressive. And since you record at at faster speed, I think the quality is better.

[Mr. Davenport]

I couldn't achieve this with my cassette player. I opened it up and only saw a circuit board.