Threading a 7 Inch Reel: Reel to Reel Recording

Video Transcript

"For Expert Village, I'm Kurt, Chief Engineer at KGB Studios in Seattle. We're now going to show you how to string up a tape recorder here with the reel to reel tape. And so we'll get right to it, right now. Okay, so, this is actually a blank tape, reel to reel. And what we'll have to do is we're gong to insert that on here. So, we'll just take it out as we're doing. We just take it out. This is actually the reel to reel. It's a blank reel to reel. It's seven and a half inch and it contains about 1800 feet of tape. So it has this piece here, the leader piece, which is this piece of tape right here. We'll actually string that up around here and over to our take-up reel right in here. Okay, so, now we're actually getting ready to mount this. One other piece that I wanted to make sure you knew is, on these older fashion, old-fashioned tape recorders, there's this little pressure point here where you pull it out and it actually locks these reels in place. So, right on to where we go, we'll just line these grooves up onto the spool. Push it back in there nice and firm and then we'll adjust it like so. Make sure that this piece, this center piece right here is adjusted, and now we'll start stringing the tape, if you can follow that. Here comes the stringer tape. Great. Okay, so here's the leader tape. Now, I'm going to take this piece off here so that you can see this a little bit better. This is the face place for the actual head. And in our other series on reel to reel, you can see what we do with that. So we literally just pull this piece off very simply. Lay that aside so you can see the stringing of the tape easier. So we'll just string this along like so. As you can see, we're bringing it up, now you need to loosen it up over on the big reel, and then bring it up and we'll lock it in off of one of these little groove areas here. And I like to put it right in this section here and lock it in. As you can see, I'll lock it in in this part right here, like that. And then, I just roll the tape around to where it will string up. And that, my friends, is how we string a reel to reel tape recorder."