Yesterday I came across an old BIB Splicer in a box. This was a domestic equivalent of a tape editing block, with little levers attached to hold the 1/4″ in place while cutting it with the supplied, single edge razor blade. It was a fun little introduction to tape editing, a much more taxing process that the easy cut and paste of digital.
Not that there’s anything wrong with digital editing – it’s absolutely great being able to chop and change at will, undo and redo effortlessly, with the capability to do things which would have been impossible in analogue days. (But take note – digital cross fades can be cloudy. If a straight cut doesn’t work, your edit markers are wrong.)
When tape was order of the day, every engineer had to get to grips with the risky job of painstakingly locating edit points with a chinagraph pencil, physically cutting up performances, and sticking it all back together again, hoping the edits were clean and inaudible. On occasion it could be very challenging, especially where editing multitrack tape was concerned. Cock that up, and you had a big problem. One of my engineers once fixed a click on the 2″ 24 track by taking his best guess as to where the offending click would be found in relation to the head block,(track 17 as I remember) then cutting a tiny window in the tape to remove it.
But the greatest tape editing feat, of urban legend proportions – witnessed by my brother – was by a BBC engineer who had to remove the “whissss” from a very siblant interviewee with ill fitting false teeth. The job was adeptly done in 10 minutes. Then he reassembled the discarded pieces to play “God Save The Queen”!
