#22

That’s a really interesting observation. I’ll add to it that, when I recently picked up a 1/4 AKAI deck and recorded my first take on it, I was blown away by how damn good it sounded. Tape can be great for going lo-fi, but it’s also got a phenomenal resolution to it. Same goes for celluloid film I suppose.

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#23

All fair comments but my point is simply that at one point in my lifetime it was impossible to affordably reproduce 16-bit sound, let alone anything higher. Now, working at lower bitrates (and the various things you mention) are a choice, borne out of a desire for a particular aesthetic or out of the compromise between quality and convenience that dictates how many of us as a species choose to live most of our lives.

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#24

friend just gave me a huge collection of tapes he inherited from mitch altman

5 blank cassettes are in those boxes, so I am considering making a series of montage of heck style sound collages on my 4 track

dizzied at the possibilities, this is…so many sounds

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#25

what i was taught was that you would get more high end loss on the outside tracks, both open reel and cassette and that printing kick and bass guitar to 1 and 8 (or 1 and 4) was standard.

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#26

that’s because the head wears out more near the top and bottom edge. might make more sense with older tape head designs, made of materials that wear more easily, or with systems seeing heavy use, but later materials can sustain what would otherwise make for serious wear. in reality since now most of us are going after the low fidelity of the cassette medium, i’d say there’s no difference.

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#27

oh those boxes! :hearts:

#28

Recording the birds in my back yard + a sound collage tape into the stereo Walkman for a friend

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#29

Passion Sources! Terry Riley!

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#30

Be sure to check them to see if you have any Type II in there (they’ll be darker colored tape) and hang on to them!

#31

mitch didnt leave me any but i have 5 or 10 type 2 tapes about. I use them selectively - I think the spectral machine noise / translation errors can sometimes be a feature more than a bug.

especially if a tape is one of those 30 minute streams of pretty you can get out of Cranes without much dissonance in the melodic structure, introducing discordance through machine noise is an interesting way to create and resolve tension.

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#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?