#32

How many of y’all are familiar with screw tapes?

I learned about this practice yesterday because it turns out George Floyd was into this in the 90s– when lean was really big in Houston, people liked to dub rap tapes using decks that were low on battery to slow them down.

I learned this about 12 hours after I had done the exact same thing to willie nelson’s blue skies, to turn it into a sad song.

George Floyd was tape head!!! :sob: :sob: :sob:

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#33

I remember those. DJ Screw was way into Purple Drank, and died from overdosing on it. But slowing stuff way down is still cool—especially analog sounds.

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#34

I wonder if there’s any relationship to vaporwave from this.

#35

Ahh yes the Chopped & Screwed remixes. Love those!

#36

chopping and screwing got me into making music on the computer in the first place… hadn’t really thought of going back to doing it the old fashioned way (although I guess you’d need a turntable and a tape deck, cuz I believe the original slowed down sound was achieved by running records at slower speeds? I could be wrong about this…) Love using loopers for this type of effect though : )

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#37

I like to pick up “found media” for sampling purposes. Bought some old church recordings and this massive lot of weird dubbed Japanese tapes from Yahoo Auctions (still need to go through them. Ha)

#38

Yessss thats the peril of buying used cassettes, half are too precious to record over

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#39

I’ll have to post some of the covers from the Japanese collection here, they’re great. I don’t know if they were made or bought.

#40

Just relaying what I heard in an interview - that def seems like an easier way than starving the battery.

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#41

Can 4 track recorder plug into a eurorack? What module would I need and what brand of decks should I look into? Would a Fostex X-18 be able to?

#42

Perhaps you could specify your use case a little more in detail? Also, when you say

do you mean the inputs or outputs or both?
As for inputting audio from your 4track into your modular, you will almost certainly need a module which is able to boost your signal to the appropriate eurorack levels (which are much higher than regular line levels).
You might not need a separate module for attenuating down your signals when you feed them from your modular to the desired 4track but I would highly recommend using one as this will give you much better control over your levels bevor the clipping/overdrive starts.
Perhaps a module like
LISTEN IO
from 4ms would be a suitable solution which can do both, input and output.

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#43

maybe i can piggyback onto this…

i had a similar thought, i’ve been looking into getting the folktek listen and synesthesia, mic preamps and envelope followers, respectively - mostly for getting drums and percussion into my modular. would these work for running my tape loops through my system as well?

would a headphone jack into a normal 3.5mm jack work? they look the same but i’m always assuming modular cables are different than headphone cables.

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#44

Yeah I’d always heard about DJ Screw pitching down vinyl on turntables and adding effects. A bit of a wander around Wikipedia articles linked out to a New York Times piece on DJ Screw that says:

The results of D.J. Screw’s labors often sound like rap records played underwater on an old cassette deck that’s running out of batteries and needs its tape heads cleaned.

So maybe that description of what the music sounds like has got translated over the years to some lore about how the music was made.

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#45

Gonna do an experiment with my ttsh tomorrow with running an output from my marantz cassette player thru the preamp/ envelope follower, maybe use it as white noise for a hat/ percussion sound.

Tomorrow is today

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#46

@pftjschute just wanted to say these studies are really fantastic really enjoying listening through, i feel like there’s a whole lot of interesting ideas and flow for what I (assume) is improvised exploration. thanks for sharing!

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#47

much appreciated! yes, all are improvised and patched live.

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#48

(Hopefully) relevant for this thread…

Last night I watched Aaron Dilloway’s remote performance for Tusk Festival, in which he ran microphones into his garden to capture the sounds of his chickens, birds in the trees, planes overhead etc, and ran the audio into his array of tape machines and tape loops. I don’t think its been posted anywhere else yet, but this video from April features a related performance where his chickens also have a starring role:

I feel this set really captures what’s wonderful about the texture of tape and sounds of a room looped back into the room etc etc. Small actions and details made special and other by the medium. This, along with listening to a bunch of Hive Mind and Jason Zeh recently, has really reminded me how much I like the feel of tape, especially in pieces dealing with noisy, humming / hissing textures. These three artists particularly excel at those moments where the texture of the material and the texture of the medium saturate and blur and cross-over and become one thing (especially when listening to the release on cassette).

I don’t think I have any grand conclusions to draw from this, just wanted to share. I love subtle and melodic use of tapes as well, just wanted to give a nod towards stuff that pushes the medium into really blown-out territory as well.

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#49

this may be more reel-to-reel based, but i’ve always wondered how people like giovanni lami and valerio tricoli are using stretched out tape loops in their live performances (and probably the production process), what effect that has on the sound of the recorded material, and if it’s possible to recreate that process with cassettes.

i know that many people stretch cassette tapes out beyond the case and wrap it around something, but is that just for longer loops or is there some other advantage? I like that valerio seems to be amplifying parts of the actual tape deck as well and manipulating the tape with his fingers for warble or pitch/slowing effect. but im wondering if there is something more to using tape that adds to the sound design or processing that audio that’s on the tape

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#50

I can’t speak for @giovannilami but I can say that if you have a tape loop out and lots of pressure applied to keeping it tight then it will eventually stretch and introduce extremely minute time stretch to the material, probably only noticeable if you try to sync it up with something. Though usually for a long tape loop you will need to avoid making it so tight that the deck can’t pull it through so we’re talking very very very tiny time adjustment.

Sometimes the material you run the tape over will degrade the tape, physically removing the ferric oxide and thus changing the signal itself. See “destruction loops” for more on that.

Sometimes, in a long loop, the tape itself can sway or bounce or be lightly manipulated to create a kind of slow vibrato.

For Lami’s specific techniques I think he’s discussed them here before, maybe even earlier in this thread?

I haven’t done outside-the-shell loops with cassette, someone else will have to pipe up for that.

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#51

Yes, I wrote about my recording & processing techniques (how to say “attitude”) here
But if you have some more questions I’m here, just ask.
Ciao! :fallen_leaf: :black_heart:

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