How to Listen to a Reel-to-Reel Tape Machine

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, Kurt Glaser, KGB Studios, Seattle. Let's continue now with our sessions on "How to use a Two Track Reel to Reel Tape Recorder". Okay, in this session on how to use a reel to reel, we're actually just for listening purposes only. We've got a deck that is completely turned off here, and we want to actually just enjoy listening to it just on a headphones, on our trusty headphones here. So let's just go ahead and do that. I'll show you how to do that right now. First of all, once you've got your tape strung up, what I like to do is I want to make sure that the tape tension, on this one as you can see it's not tight, so I want to make sure that it's tight and taut here. I like to watch this little spooler over here on this side over here, that will tell me that it's tight. And sometimes you can tell by looking at this take up piece here. So we have the take up spooler here and we've got the real that we're going to listen to right here. The next thing we want to do is we want to make sure that we're plugged in our headphones so you plug in the headphones into the phone jack. And then also you want to remember you definitely need to, you want to make sure that this volume control is up. Pay no attention to this one, this one is in the back, so that one doesn't have any pertinence. It actually is pretty cool. Most reel to reel's have one for left, and the other one in the case, for right. So I turn those up, probably about three quarters of the way, and now we're ready to listen if I have the settings right. So I power the device up at this point, make sure these are not activated, and you want to make sure you've got your headphones on, and kick it into gear, and then un-pause it, and you can start listening to some great sounds through the headphones. And that's how you actually listen to a reel to reel there."