You may also need to have the tapes "baked" if they're sticky and make noise, or wont play without stopping or gunking up the tape path.
A couple of caveats first, before even putting them on the machine: If you have the machine they were recorded onto in the first place, great! But otherwise, there's playback calibration issues to contend with as well.
Before doing
anything with the tapes, clean and thoroughly demagnetize the tape path FIRST. (Old machines - esp prosumer machines - are oftenbadly maintained. There's always a chance you could be erasing precious high end as soon as you put them up for playback.)
Hopefully, your tapes will have some alignment tones at the front to help you set up the machine for optimum playback quality. Azimuth (head tilt) is as critical and important as is EQ, clean heads and demagnetizing. Ideally, you'll have a 1k tone printed on the tapes for level, a couple of HF tones (10k or 15K) for azimuth and EQ, and some lower tones (100, 80hz, etc.) for low end EQ and so on.
If there are enough tapes to warrant it, you may be better off sending them to a professional house to have them transferred to digital. Those guys take care of ALL of that stuff for you, and it may be better in the long run, if all you REALLY want to do is work on the actual music and not become analog tape techs.
One thing we always do with any older tapes is to GENTLY wind them through a few times; usually without threading them in the tape path (again, best to let a pro do this if you're not savvy or experienced enough) and hold a soft cloth on the tape surface itself, removing dust, gunk, etc. (This is tedious and takes a lot of time and patience, but it'll show you the condition of your tape - lots of shedding means potential trouble and the need for baking. It will also show you were any bad or faulty splices are in the tape, etc.) If you're new at this, DO NOT do it with critical tapes; practice on something old and useless first. Don't use the high-torque setting on the machine, either (if there IS one)....you could hurt your fingers or worse- damage the tape itself if you mess up.
Assuming you've gotten it all done and transferred, make sure you do a slow-wind (real time playback) and store the tape tails-out, so that the next time you ever work on it, the tape will be smoothly packed on the reel, and any print-through will be an echo (not a pre-echo)
But even if your'e doing this for fun - and to help your dad - you may learn a few things and enjoy yourselves by doing it together.
Good luck and happy time-travelling!
