08/15/2023
Here it is - the TARK 144. I have dreamed of making this pedal for a very, very long time.
TLDR; Its a faithful replica of a Teac 144 channel strip with saturating dynamics ๐ช
In my early 20's, a good friend of mine introduced me to the TASCAM 488. I was used to digital recording and boy was it so much harder to get good results on cassette tape! But that was part of the charm, you had to capture the actual moment and think about how you were gonna organize time and bounce tracks. It was a fun challenge.
Later on, brought me a song he wanted me to mix that he had recorded on his Teac 144. We loaded the tape into TASCAM 688 and we got pretty confused about which of the 4 tracks were in phase when playing back on a machine with 8 read channels ใฐ๏ธ๐ค Eventually, brought me into recording process with him and his delightfully gnarly 144. I was always impressed by how it would capture sounds in a very crunchy, yet instantly classic sounding way.
The goal of the TARK 144 was to capture the sound of this early tape machine in a guitar pedal. To this end, I borrowed that very 144 that we recorded with, disassembled it, and measured the bias voltages on the pesky JFET preamp circuit. Then I translated the circuitry to guitar pedal voltages. There was one more thing it needed to sound right - I added a saturating dynamics circuit to emulate the noise reduction circuitry that was never quite in calibration. I gave the first prototype to and was thrilled when he gave it his discerning stamp of approval. I hope you do too!
Audio/video demos will come soon ใฐ๏ธ
DID I MENTION WE'RE ALSO RELEASING THE CIRCUIT IN EURORACK FORMAT? more on that in another post
