Cassette tape effects

[zlemflolia]

Anyone know any novel or reliable cassette tape destruction techniques for LO-FI production or effects?

 

Ideas:

 

-Record over and over until little magnetic dust remains

-Scrape dust off the tape in a desired periodic or constant pattern (before or after recording)

-Stretch the tape in a desired consistent or periodic pattern (before or after recording)

-Record at very low volume then amplify it for a high noise to signal ratio

-Record at very high volume for distortion

-Play around with variable replay speed pot on some cassette players while recording off a cassette which is playing

-Record something onto cassette but quickly smash the record then stop button over and over for a stuttering effect in what is recorded

-Two cassette players, one with variable speed replay pot (P) and one for recording ®. Two cassettes. Record your sound onto one cassette then play it in P at slow/fast speed while recording into R. Switch the cassettes and repeat this to gradually reallllly speed up or slow down your recording. In the end perform a pitch shift (digitally?) to get it back closer to where it was so it's just a speedup or leave it alone

 

 

Any others? Ideas which I'm not sure about:

 

-If you record something onto the tape, maybe something with high variance in volume, then record something quiet over it, will the original recording still be lightly visible underneath or modify the next recording in some way? That could be interesting

 

[Herr Jan]

 

THE FINAL FRONTIER OF TAPE SMUDGE HAS BEEN BROKEN

read the manual here www.legowelt.org/shadowwolfissue3.html

(Scroll down to the end)

The SMACKOS TAPE STATION is an audio effects rack for Ableton 9 and up. It simulates the sound of an old cassettedeck.

Instant smacked out old school disintegrated tape sound. No HIFI professional abbey road boring old shovelware. Guarenteed dirty heads and worn out transistors.

get it at ---> www.legowelt.org

+

http://forum.watmm.com/topic/85615-smackos-tape-smudge-x-for-ableton-8-9/

[zlemflolia]

Sounds pretty cool. I'm more interested in physical manipulation though

[Trilobot]

I've made a tape loop before, I found this link here and pretty much did what it said -> http://synthhacker.blogspot.com/2014/02/cassette-tape-loop.html

[psn]

LFO -> tape speed

[kinski]

legowelt gave out the best tip - record it to tape at 120%, then slow down the pitch on the motor during playback. requiers a 4track. effects are pleasant.

 

for a random tape smudge just record to reel to reel and sometime slow the tape with your hand during moemnts you see the tape smudge fit.

 

also - use reel to reel with old / used tapes. this gives the best fidelity while also doing some proper damage. cassettes are ok but get muddy easily.

[mcbpete]

One we did a few albums ago - Whack the tape in a microwave for a bit (left up to the discretion of your own personal safety)

[joshuatxuk]

If you can find a tape player in good shape (i.e. good quality tapehead) but with crappy belts you can get a lot of good wow and flutter.

[joshuatxuk]

Also if you want their trademark faded old tape sound / old radio sound you can easily do it by recording onto 50s and 60s era mini reel to reel tape recorders. I have one i got for xmas thats fun to play with. They are on ebay a lot.

[joshuatxuk]

Hardware options:

 

HC TT

 

 

El Capistan w/ wow and flutter

 

 

Another weird option, get a 8-track player and a cassette 8-track adapter. These were made back in the day so folks could play cassettes in their cars or stereos that lacked tape players but had 8-track players. I've read these were prone to warble a lot, as the mechanism was really simple.

 

[Kavinsky]

just do this
https://www.facebook.com/166534330152827/videos/511999112273012/

[mcbpete]

That reminds me of my favourite Deathprod track / remix: Kakonita (Nils Petter Molvær) [Deathprod Mix]

 

http://physical-preview.bleep.com/RUNEGRAMMOFON_REP2053_6.mp3

[Alcofribas]

just do this

https://www.facebook.com/166534330152827/videos/511999112273012/

every time i see videos like that i can't stop but think of that limmy vid where he's "playing" the vcr

[cwmbrancity]

Julian Cope & TPS did similar tricks on some of the Odin/Queen Elizabeth long-players

[modey]

-If you record something onto the tape, maybe something with high variance in volume, then record something quiet over it, will the original recording still be lightly visible underneath or modify the next recording in some way? That could be interesting

 

This happened when I taped SAW85-92 over my cassette of Kid A that I recorded off the radio. I was listening to it with a friend in his car and could hear distant eerie singing.. turned it up and it was fkn thom yorke lol

[mcbpete]

 

just do this

https://www.facebook.com/166534330152827/videos/511999112273012/

every time i see videos like that i can't stop but think of that limmy vid where he's "playing" the vcr

 

Yes mate !

 

[Leon Sumbitches]

Flol. Big Limmy fan here but that one's new to me.

[Alcofribas]

i could -- and should -- watch that vid every morning.

[Guest]

Bought a second hand Sony TCM-313 recently, which is an old memo/field-to-cassette-recorder, sporting an inbuilt shitty mic;

 

 

100% guaranteed lo-fi'ness, though you might want to look out for the more expensive brothers, which have pitch control, and/or let you insert any mic.

[kinski]

i recently started doing some recordings on minicassette, which is to microcassettes what beta is to vhs. i found a recorder and 10 tapes (new) for 2 euros. proper ansering machine quality.

[ZoeB]

Mix in some subtle white noise, then roll off the top end, that'll get you most of the way there. ;)

[purlieu]

Uncoil a lot of the tape, scrunch it up a lot, then wind it back in. Lots of cuts and varying dynamics from that. You can also run a magnet over the tape and it loses some of its recordability. I did all this to a tape then recorded a piano piece onto it, the sound gradually faded away into murk over three or four minutes.

Note: demagnetising the tape can ruin your tape recorder. I managed to restore mine with a head cleaner but your mileage may vary.

[FrankTCaroll]

I've experimented with some tape stuff quite a bit (years ago I must admit). I've found that removing magnetic material isn't quite as rewarding as stretching the tape out with a pin or the shirt pocket part of a ballpoint pen cap. If it is a four track tape, its sometimes fun to stretch one outer edge and leave the other edge!!!       

[TubularCorporation]

Physically stretching tape is fun, I've been doing that more lately. 

 

It would be pretty dependent on your specific tape deck but if you can easily reach the belts you could probably get soe god speed modulaton by touching them while it was playing or recording - I have a spare VCR I keep around with the case open for cleaning vhs tapes and sometimes I'll record video out to that and rest my finder on the head while it's spinning to mess with the tracking, pinching the belts in a cassette deck seems like a similar idea.  Haven't tried it though.

 

If you have a degausser you could get it close enough to a cassette to partially erase it, no idea if that would sound interesting.  Purlieu, demagnetizing the tape shouldn't have any effect on your tape deck as long as the magnets don't get near the tape path and cleaning it wouldn't have any effect on magnetized heads so maybe you had a tape that was dirty or shedding or something just by coincidence. 

 

I mentioned it in the other thread, but my next frontier for cassette manipulation is heat.  Might not be interesting but you never know.

 

Kinski, I only learned about mnicasettes really recently.

 

Another interesting format I've seen once and know very little about is playtape, which was basically like 8 track cassettes except with 1/8" tape instead of 1/4" tape and four tracks instead of 8.  It would be a hassle to find a machine and tapes but you should be able to swap the tape itself between a regular cassette and a playtape cassette,which might be pointless but might also have creative potential, it's hard to say without actually having a machine.  Seems like it would be the tape version of shooting on an 8mm (not super8) film camera and then playing the unsplit reel back on a 16mm projector, which was kind of trendy for a while a few decades ago.

 

Speaking of things trendy with filmmakers in the 80s and 90s, I bet you could get some interesting effects by filming simple, high contrast geometric patterns with a Pixelvision camera and then playing that back as audio. I thought those things were so hard to get now that it's not really worth even thinking about but I just glanced at eBay and it looks like they're actually relatively common and inexpensive compared to their 90s experimental film heyday.

[TubularCorporation]

actually, I don't know why i never thought about the potential in general for using audio equipment to process Pixelvision tapes, now I want to buy one (not that I can afford to but I want to).  I've messed with running the RGB lines of a VGA signal through analog audio effects (passing the sync lines unprocessed) before and the results can look really good on a VGA monitor but I've never successfully recorded any of it, since I don't have any equipment that can record RGBHV video and all of the cheap VGA to composite and VGA to S-video converters I've tried reject the signal completely and give you a blue screen.  It's definitely very doable (there's a whole forum for that stuff on muffwiggler) but too much work for me.