Woo-hoo Cassette Tapes!

1,242meters of High Bias tapes

After quite a search, I found cassette tapes without having to go through EkkkkBay.

I went the rounds of record stores and electronic shops -- most of the "kids" manning the stores haven't even heard of cassette tapes. Which is a good thing. I take this to mean that this format is now truly vintage. 

So everyday, I'd drop by a local buy and sell website and type "cassette tape" on the search window. Dud. But of course, it's also plentiful on EeekBay; but I'm trying to limit my dealings with  Customs people (who called the Jack Bauer action figure I purchased "Ken", but that's another story).

Anyway, this local website produced a jackpot - some guy was selling one lot of cassette tapes, around 40 in all, for 500 pesos. I asked him if there were "high bias" tapes among the lot, and he said yes. No-brainer, I bought it.

Yup, it's forty plus tapes from some aspiring singer. His "demos" of James Ingram songs are on the high bias tapes - around 9 of the 40 -- I'll take that. My only disappointment is that he preferred to use the 90-minute tapes, which are more cost effective (then), but have thinner tapes. Oh well, this will have to do.

So today, I tested and taped over his version of "Every Breath You Take" (ooo kent yoooseee... yoobelong toooo meeeee...) . The tapes seem to be in good condition. I have 435 minutes of 4 track glory. Let's get down to work.

The Search for Tapes

I purchased a bunch of high bias type 2 cassette tapes five years ago, hoping to use them for demos on my badly scarred Yamaha MT8x. I figured I'd buy four or five, as this is an anachronistic medium and will be gone in a few years.

Dang, I hate it when I'm right

I got to use one, promptly forgot about the rest, then went back to digital recording.

Now with a shiny new Portastudio, I can't find the tapes anywhere. And I made some feeble attempts to find some in stores, but failed.

Aaaaaarrrrrrgggh!
I'll just have to buy from EvilBay, which will make Mr. Customs Guy happy.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1311.R5.TR11.TRC1.A0.H0.Xblank+cassette+tapes+high.TRS0&_nkw=blank+cassette+tapes+high+bias&_sacat=0&_from=R40

(this is the part where I say @$*&*&#%^ you Customs, but that's another story)

1st Blood on the 4 Tracks : Sleeping With The Lights On; Plus a Ten Peso Tour

I got excited about putting the Tascam through its paces, that I went ahead and recorded a demo of one of my band's old songs. I did forget to do two things :
     1. Clean the tape heads
     2. Get new blank cassette tapes. This might be a challenge anyway (who else still use them?). I used an old tape, and it shows on the recording -- there is a lot of sound degradation.

"Sleeping With The Lights On" is the title track of our 1996 album. Here's the recorded version http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=357691
(which I now realize is at a break-neck fast tempo)
And here's the 4-track tape demo, which I completed in about two hours
https://soundcloud.com/rommel-carrera/sleeping-4track-demo
Track 1 - sequenced drums, piano, synths, organ, and crunch guitar (played live)
Track 2 - lead vocals
Track 3 - backing vocals and clean guitar
Track 4 - bass

It seems strange dedicating one track to bass, but it seems to be the best way to do four-track. The Beatles did it in both Revolver and Sgt Peppers.

And a little tour of the gears used:
The drums sounds, piano and organ came from an Emu Proteus keyboard (actually an XK1 synth with the techno card replaced by Piano, Organ and Proteus cards). The yellow mustard color helps immensely :

A "techno" synth turned into a roots rock keyboard

The sequencer is an Emu XL7

The guitar is an Epiphone Casino, the Beatles guitar during their most creative period (1966-1969)

And the bass is a hohner headless (shown here with the Steinberger Spirit)

sorry, we both lost our heads!

Commencement - My Analog (Mis)adventures

I'm not a professional musician by any stretch of imagination. But I do have a strong interest in music, play in a band, and can fake my way through singing, playing guitar, keyboards and composing songs. A band I've played with had a major label album in the 1990s where I composed all ten original tracks, played keyboards, sang vocals and generally made a mess.

This blog will be about recording music using the analog medium - analog tape on a cassttte multitrack. I started with the tascam 424 in the early 1990s, and used that to make demo tapes of the original songs we played as a band. Our commercial album was also recorded on analog tape- a 24 track machine, but mixed to digital.

For the novices, this is analog :

yes it's a cassette tape! 

And this is digital :

Reaper asking if I want to buy the software as I've been evaluating this since the presidency of Gloria

I was probably one of the earliest adopters of affordble digital multitracks and PC recording - the free Cool Edit software looked awesome (but slow)  in 1998. Then I got a free legal copy of Cubase (which came with the purchase of a Korg X5) in 1999; and , ahem, a try-before-you buy copy of Cakewalk Pro9.

DAW (digital audio workstation) softwares are great - easy to use, fast to make music with.  You can whip up a reasonably good sounding demo with loops and softsynths (assuming you have ready ideas). You can have a half-cooked idea, record some phrases and come back later to complete the song. Or come back later and over-produce the song.

A 4-track tape machine has limitations. Only 4 -tracks(duh) vs the virtually unlimited tracks of DAWs. You have to make decisions early on which instruments go to which track. You can't copy-paste your perfect "guitar riff" or vocal chorus every 16 bars- you have to play or sing them through. Hiss, noise vs the clinical clean of digital.

Even with these limitations :
The greatest rock album of all time was recorded on a four-track machine. A historic 4-track machine, yes, but still four tracks. But look at how much fun George Martin had with those 4 tracks:

So I'm shunning my desktop PC running Reaper (legal and free!) with a Native Instruments interface. And going back to a Tascam 424 mk3 analog tape track for recording demos and the occassional mushy cover.