Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
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Comments
Mine’s still with me. Oh wait, mines a 424.
Some artists run their stuff through an old cassete player, so it's like they are using it as an effect. I heard this about Boards of Canada and Mndsgn. I love that sound and I'm listening to it in digital format.
Check it out, I never thought of using a multi-track like this. Might have to try the same with AUM later
I'm all about disks. Sorry, but they just sound better to me. They are also plenty convenient for my lifestyle. I suppose it is due to how I grew up, but I don't need to carry my entire library with me. My MiniCooper has a really nice Harmon Kardon stereo, but I have to use my iphone/ipad for my media source. I desperately want to simply pop in a favorite CD to listen to. It's a pain operating bluetooth, and the audio input. [sigh]
Disks are my fav too. How they convinced everyone to ditch them in favor of digital only for about the same money, is baffling.
CDs don't take up too much room, they sound better than compressed/streamed/etc., have tangible artwork, are collectable, somewhat resistant to damage, and come with their own storage media.
Another great thing about having physical media, is that I can look up on the shelf and look through my collection. I can pull a CD out and go, "Wow, I can't believe I bought this.. and liked it! What was I thinking?!"
Or, I can also pull out a CD that was obscure, alternative, niche back about 15 years ago... listen to it now and go, "Wow, these cats were waaaay ahead of their time. This stuff sounds even better now, and would rank highly if released today for the first time."
For music that only exists digitally, I tend to lose track of it. They either eventually get lost to a hard drive failure, or most often, simply forgotten. Sure, you can just look through your old digital files, but it's not the same.
I like having the collectable, physical media on a shelf to peruse every now and then... to rediscover stuff from my past, and what stuff still holds up... or even is much better in the present perspective.
I used to use Roland SP 808 which had Zip Disks. Very exspensive the disks. But when all together with Roland MC 505, Vintage Synth module, Novation Basstation(x2) sequenced via an Amiga(OctamMED Soundstudio with midi interface), then all channelled thru a Phonic 8 channel mixer. It was quite mad, and very enjoyable. All recorded into a Philps CD Recorder. I couldn't afford a DAT Tape then......... Sigh!....... Sweet memories.......
I’ve got one of these:
http://www.datrecorders.co.uk/sv3800.php
which replaced my old (now pretty much wrecked):
http://www.datrecorders.co.uk/da7.php
OMG...I strongly agree with all of this!
A friend of mine had a cassette of military radio and personal interviews recorded in Viet Nam by his dad during the war. Crazy psychedelic madness. Desperately wish I could have copied it before he eventually lost the thing.
Ouch. Gold.
I have a giant box of old cassettes in my basement filled with recordings of my old bands, bootlegged concerts/studio out takes of all my favorite artists, and a bunch of commercially released stuff I used to listen to in the car. Pretty much all the bootlegs and studio out takes are available on YouTube or have been commercially released and I have digital copies of everything except my old band/solo recordings from the 80s to the early 90s. I've been meaning to hook up my old Kenwood dual cassette deck to a computer to preserve my stuff. Not enough drive to dig through all those old tapes (most unlabeled) and then find a place for the tape deck and wire it up to a computer/iPad, etc.
I don't miss cassettes at all, but I've got some unfinished business with them.
This thread made me remember I have loads of cassetes and CDs that I have to digitalize.
Personally, I was always more cassette than vinyl. It’s not only the truer stereo track separation despite an-hysteric heat transfer, versus groove intermodulation. It’s that I could record on them. If I couldn’t actually make a recording, when I was young, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into making my own electronic music at all. When I showed a girlfriend’s younger sister how to overdub using two basic mono cassette recorders and just playing and recording them to each other (through the air, acoustically, no wires) while adding your own voice along with the copy, it revealed a whole new world of creativity.
Very much the same here. This is one of my favorite parts of sampling other synths into NS' Eden. Any modulation in the source signal is sped up or down as you play across the keyboard. When going for perfect recreation it can be a pain. When going for something different, it can be really inspiring and the rhythmic collisions can be really beautiful.
I heard a story on NPR a while back about this subject: Apparently there is a sole company that still makes cassette media of many sorts.
Yes! Did the same with guitars around 1979-80. Later, probably 1983 or so, my friend and I used to go back and forth, between tape decks, through the air, track by track, to record full songs with guitars, bass, drums, and vocals. I had completely forgotten about that until you mentioned it. Thank you!
I had a pretty sweet two cassette unit system going for a while where I did the same but via wires and a mixer. Thing was, one of the decks recorded at a slightly slower speed so I had to retune for each overdub! Eventually learned to a) pitch down the first tracks I recorded so they didn't chimpmunk by the end and b) record the first tracks with super boosted treble so that when I rolled it off later to handle all of the noise build up they didn't get dulled out completely. Total pain in the ass but similar to @supanorton I have really warm memories of doing it. Better than dealing with mismatched sample rates anyway.
@syrupcore it's cliche, but it's so often all about the chase. Beautiful stuff.
A can of worms here, because I love talking cassettes and older home recording technology...
The Tascam 488 mkII (my unit pictured) was the last great Tascam PortaStudio made and was my main choice for recording for years, much like iOS is now. Cassettes have a great many drawbacks but because it was what I could get in 1998 it was just a fact to deal with. I had a Tascam 424 as well (bought in late '93) but the 488 mkII was eight tracks and the mixer (with inserts) was excellent.
There was hiss of course, but with good, hot levels on good quality tape (Maxell XLIIs was my favorite) and dbx noise reduction it could be dealt with. The fact every time you played the tape some of the high frequencies would be sacrificed was a real concern. Maintenance of the machine was huge because without daily head cleaning and weekly demagnetizing the very recorder you worked on would start to work against you, erasing more high end or eating up tapes.
It was a bit different than now, laying back with an iPad & headphones tracking synth parts & mixing in bed. I still love the way analog (cassettes did it too, not just big 2" tape) would compress bass and drums imparting this glue to it. A lot of me using the 488 mkII into the 2000's was nostalgia, no doubt, but I also dug the work flow and immediacy of popping in a tape, setting a level & hitting record. That's why iOS recording technology reminds me very much of the cassette days with of course the fidelity miles above. I can grab the iPad, start an app and go. It was much more of a 'session' (with track sheets, maintenance, etc) working with analog/cassette.
The work you had to put into keeping cassette productions sounding professional was real taxing, between charting recording order for tracks, minimum bouncing, tape degradation, etc. I had a DAT recorder that I'd do external bounces on just to try and keep fidelity up when trying to add more sounds than what the track count allowed. Mixing to DAT helped but bottom line, getting a good demo from cassettes took work.
I wouldn't take a project of completed songs and put them on a cassette. Not in 2016 with the digital options and standards we have today. I would, and still do however use analog as flavoring in the sterile environment digital can sometimes be. I have rhythm tracks made on the 488 mkII I made years back with guitar, bass, drums (all instruments that excel with analog recording) that I have transferred over to DAW to add vocals, keys, solos (all stuff that suffer from analog recording and benefit from digital clarity).
I also have run loops through a PortaStudio, recorded them hot, then bounced back to digital where the analog added a flavor that no plug in can. I look back fondly at working with cassettes and will admit than when I first moved to ProTools I missed it. But now that I have found iOS recording and how tactile and immediate it is, much like analog/PortaStudio work, I don't miss cassettes at all. I wouldn't put out my music on them now and most certainly wouldn't buy new music on cassette. Not in 2016. Be cool...
Nicely told sir....
+1
I remember the first time I heard Santana was on an 8-track tape. That is some good stuff right there, let me tell ya...
8-tracks!
I had one of those legendary copies of Metal Machine Music on 8-track.
You may enjoy this:
It uses one of the "ghost tapes" used by US PSYOPS during the Vietnam war.
I got deeply into collecting 8 tracks in the 90s. They were like 10 for a dollar at yard sales and I realized I could get a lot of older music for nothing. Music that I was interested in or wanted to explore but didn't really want to spend $10-15 on (this was pre streaming or downloads so it was the best deal going). I learned an awful lot about classic country, jazz and soul via 8-tracks well after their heyday. I had hundreds and hundreds of them.
When I was a teenager in the 70s, a local stereo shop sold bootleg 8-tracks of current releases at a price of 4 for $10. There is so much music that I also first heard on 8-track. That strange seque in a song that would occur when the tape would switch tracks became a part of the song.
I learned all the early blues greats road tripping around Texas, buying the $1.99 tapes from gas stations' countertop cassette carrousels. Bought some old country for good measure as well... but not too much.
You've got the lyrics for a song there Mister, just dig a little more into those fly-blown days...
my first real 4 track was the yamaha mt44! I still have a pack of sensor labels and a master tape i recorded some tunes on.
I still use MD (I have two MZ-1's which were the first units--NO SCMS!!), DCC, and still master to DAT. I also record a track to cassette and play it back on my boombox.
That is badass! Yamaha made good stuff, very top quality in the early home recording market.
This was Yamaha's version of the Tascam 488mkII that I have. It is very similar but the Yami didn't have XLR inputs and phantom power, and a few other features that made the 488mkII the more popular unit. It was still a marvel of engineering for the time.