Put my tape on pause and add some more to yours

March 19, 2010 11:42 PM

The idea of the cassette: A gallery with musings. [via]
posted by cashman (27 comments total)

My brother made a mixtape out of necessity. His car being a rather unremarkable Chevy Malibu with a tape deck, and him living in a rather unremarkable town with truly awful radio stations. He hooked his computer up to a stereo, and the stereo to a tape recorder and recorded a youtube video (of all things) of Justice's Waters of Nazerth. This produced a unique distortion that I described as "phat" and I have yet to reproduce. Recently he found a Half Price Books and stocked up on 80's hair metal tapes.

And that's all I got.
posted by hellojed at 12:12 AM on March 20, 2010

Nostalgia overload. The very last cassettes that I purchased was/were Garage Inc. by Metallica. It turned me on to Whiskey in the Jar which I'd never heard before.

Meanwhile I still have a lot of cassettes that are probably unplayable that go back to the early 70s including Jethro Tull and Tangerine Dream.

By the time that I got most of my album collection on cassette there were DVDs. By the time that I got a decent amount of my collection of albums, and cassettes in DVD versions, there were MP3 players and the iPod.

Now I've gotten most of that collection on an iPod Touch.

So that means a sea-change is a commin'.

Probably means that I need to get a plug in my head or some shit. No problem. As long as I can get a turntable that will let me directly rip my Be Bop Deluxe albums directly into my frontal cortex, I'm good.
posted by Splunge at 12:16 AM on March 20, 2010

I only have all my ideas on vinyl.
posted by turgid dahlia at 2:04 AM on March 20, 2010

i have built a cassette tape-loop or two, in my time.

also. this guy made some bitchin' cassette art. sorry, can't link directly to the images, but it's the first part of the portfolio. just click on the leftmost pix along the top of the page...

http://mcampbellart.com/portfolio.html
posted by lapolla at 4:21 AM on March 20, 2010

I used to make mixtapes all the time, using vinyl as my source, of course. Technics turntable. Nakamichi tape deck, tweaked to work best with Maxell tapes. Making a great mixtape took time and was a work of love...the way you'd set-up a theme and work the story or groove over the span of one side of the cassette. It's the closest I ever came to being a DJ. The box of my best mixtapes were stolen out of my car in a late-night smash-n-grab outside my girlfriend's house.

FWIW, I never once bought a commercial pre-recorded cassette. And I never heard a commercial cassette that sounded good.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:24 AM on March 20, 2010

Do you feel any cassette nostalgia?

I probably released a barely audible sigh, which would have been below the db level of tape hiss, when I threw about 100 of them in the garbage a couple months ago.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:05 AM on March 20, 2010

I'm so hip, I'm nostalgic for the cassingle.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:18 AM on March 20, 2010

I'm so embarrassed. I have a wall full of these things, and of course, nothing left upon which to play them. I finally got them all in alphabetical order. How can I throw them out now?
posted by Wylie Kyoto at 5:31 AM on March 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I pretty much associate my musial coming-of-age with the portable CD player (you geezers), but for a while working in a big chain music store during college my boss and I had a ton of fun going one-by-one through his old mixtape collection. He'd bring in an intricately decorated little plastic box with a shitty little cassette inside and it'd warble the weirdest, most eclectic music from the 70's and 80's all over our zillions of new releases and into my tender ears. The best part, though, was the stories he'd tell about the genesis of the mix. He remembered every road trip, all the hot summer nights sneakily making out with his classmates and friends, and would constantly tell me about the rigorous, aching method used to construct the tapes: sit in front of the radio for an entire day, or three days straight, waiting for them to play the one song that had to go next. Cool guy, good times, and so there's my second-hand cassette tape nostalgia.
Oh, but I'm pretty sure I still have my cassingle for Sophie B. Hawkins' Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover.
posted by carsonb at 6:54 AM on March 20, 2010

Tapes sounded muddy and dull even at their best especially when you spilled your 80's hair gel on them but one thing I sorely miss about making old school mix tapes was the the Master Volume Control knob. Running out of tape at the end of your mix? Cocteau Twins going on and on and on and on? Time for a fadeout.
posted by applemeat at 7:23 AM on March 20, 2010

Much of the nostalgia from cassettes definitely comes from the mixtape - the tape was the first medium that allowed people to easily make their own playlists. And what do you do with mixtapes? You share them! As a sophomore in high school one of english teachers gave me a mixtape that was one half Melt Banana and one half Mike Patton. Completely awesome - it widened my music sensibilities so much that I attribute a huge chunk of my current music collection (~1400 CDs + records and counting) to that one tape. The rest of my music tastes came from listening to my brother's mixtapes as he drove me to school - a never-ending collection of the Jesus Lizard, Soundgarden, Green River, Mudhoney, Hum, etc. Listening to other peoples' mixtapes made me the rampant audiophile I am today.


Making mixtapes was such a giddy experience too. I still remember my first mixtape because it was completely amazing - a collection rips from my favorite vinyl 7" singles. I made it as a driving mix because the radio totally sucks, man! It was a sad day when the deck in my Honda Accord decided to freak out and chew it up. It happened on a beautiful, sunny day right in the middle of playing Atomic Fireball's thrashy cover of "Swingset" by Frodus. In one awesome, weird, and utterly depressing moment the tape sped up and then toppled over into a sea of static, basically turning the track into a Merzbow joint (something I wasn't quite ready for yet). RIP little buddy.

Also, from an aesthetic standpoint tapes just look cooler than records or CDs, which are basically just circles. Tapes maintain that olde tyme reel-to-reel construction and they're exactly what someone from the 1940's would think future media would look like. Take a look at some of the pictures in the link and imagine what they'd look like if the cassettes were replaced by collections of circles. Booooring.
posted by Consonants Without Vowels at 7:29 AM on March 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

One of my noise musician friends told me I shouldn't feel too nostalgic about cassettes. According to him, they're staging an underground comeback with the kids. Artists release on them, people crave them for the low-fi garage tech sound.

I can't vouch for this, since he's the only real noise musician I manage to hang with and the only 'kids' I deal with these days are the ones I tell to get of my lawn, but I know he releases all stuff of his on cassette as well and seems to feel the trouble is worth it. Not a nostalgia I feel, necessarily. I am a hasty sort and like skipping instantaneously to where I want. Which I guess is one thing artists like about cassettes: people are lazy and will listen to things in the order you wish them to.
posted by umberto at 7:32 AM on March 20, 2010

We are not just the music, but also the audio distortion of our youth.
posted by localroger at 7:56 AM on March 20, 2010

Also, from an aesthetic standpoint tapes just look cooler than records or CDs, which are basically just circles. Tapes maintain that olde tyme reel-to-reel construction and they're exactly what someone from the 1940's would think future media would look like.

I think this is really part of it. But there's also just the wear-and-tear of real life to contend with. When buying music, my medium of choice was always -- easily -- the cassette, at least until about the mid-'90s when you really had no choice but to give in and buy the CD. The cassette is a sturdy, practical, industrial solution that just makes sense. Why in the world is a CD bigger than a cassette? I don't know -- I'd think that you'd be able to put as much info as would fit on a tape onto a pretty tiny little disc -- but it is, leading to a Discman that was like strapping a paperback book to your hip. A portable tape player is just a better device (smaller, no skips), and the cassette itself! Where a CD will fracture, chip, shatter, scratch, a cassette is something you have to really try to destroy. A CD sounds better, absolutely no question, but only as long as you keep it clean and flawless; I've known people to have CDs floating all over their car, usually out of their cases, and inevitably listening to them becomes a frustrating experience after about a month (the ones that aren't just accidentally stomped into oblivion). But I mean, you can fish a cassette out of the gutter and there's a strong chance that fucker will work.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:13 AM on March 20, 2010

Kittens, the CD was never intended to be rugged or portable; it was meant to replace the LP, not the cassette. I think the people who invented the CD format in the late 1970's would have been quite amused at the idea of building a player not much bigger than the disk and carrying it with you while you jog.

The intended successor to the cassette was the Digital Audio Tape. The DAT failed though because (this will I'm sure come as a big surprise) of DRM so restrictive that you couldn't even make a third generation copy of something you recorded yourself without paying thousands of dollars for special production decks that would reset the DRM bits.
posted by localroger at 8:57 AM on March 20, 2010

Earlier today in a thrift store I bought a copy of The Stranglers' Black and White on cassette for fifty cents. But I've always hated cassettes for music; the only reason to buy one is if it's dirt cheap.
posted by cropshy at 9:07 AM on March 20, 2010

The guy seems to miss an important part-- the beauty of cassettes is that they are infinitely reusable. You get to sit down and engrave your ideas, your images, onto a thin piece of film which can then be sent anywhere.

The last time I used a tape was sending an internet friend a mix of j-rock. He didn't have a cd player (this was 2003), so I climbed back in front of my stereo, found a lingering blank tape, pushed that transient switch for the first time in years, and started to meticulously inscribe the track data onto the card.

But yeah, he glosses over the idea of mixing, without exploring what it meant.

As for tapes being indestructible, well, that goes two ways.

The first way, you can just tape them back together if it breaks. (lol)

The second, if that plastic organizing casing gets removed somehow (ran over by a bus, say), you're going to be hardpressed to get any information out of the mile of thin grey brown ribbon that you have at hand. Seriously, it seems like it really is a mile long.
posted by rubah at 9:17 AM on March 20, 2010

The DAT failed though because (this will I'm sure come as a big surprise) of DRM so restrictive that you couldn't even make a third generation copy of something you recorded yourself without paying thousands of dollars for special production decks that would reset the DRM bits.

Also, because it sucks.

Thing is, tape is a terrible medium for digital data. Tape degrades quickly and easily. With analog, the worst you'd get from a bit of incidental magnetic exposure here and there is a bit of a dip in the audio level; with digital, you get random noise (think corrupt MP3, but, like, worse) that renders the tape utterly useless.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:35 AM on March 20, 2010

But I mean, you can fish a cassette out of the gutter and there's a strong chance that fucker will work.

Like the demo tape on Airheads?
posted by djduckie at 10:25 AM on March 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I went to an 80's party about a year ago, and decided to forgo the usual new-wave look, and be a b-boy instead. I bought a bitching boom-box tape deck from a dude off of Craigslist, and made a mix tape with classic 80's era rap on it. I made the mix by downloading the songs off of the internet, hooking my digital mixer up to the line in, and then pressing record (I had to find blank tapes at a dollar store). It was pretty neat. Instead of being able to instantly copy, paste, and delete I had to pay attention to the tape length, and pretty much live with any mistakes.

I took my boom-box / mix tape to the party and it was a big hit. I think part of that was just the fact that you had to listen to the entire mix tape, and couldn't simply skip to songs you liked. Carrying the party's soundtrack on my shoulder was quite an experience too.

So, yeah, if tapes want to make a comeback, then I have no problem with that.
posted by codacorolla at 11:27 AM on March 20, 2010

But I mean, you can fish a cassette out of the gutter and there's a strong chance that fucker will work.

Hey, remember when you couldn't go a month without seeing a tangled ribbon of audiotape on the side of the road? Festive!
posted by Sys Rq at 11:44 AM on March 20, 2010

Hey, remember when you couldn't go a month without seeing a tangled ribbon of audiotape on the side of the road?

...the mile of thin grey brown ribbon [...] Seriously, it seems like it really is a mile long.

Anyone have, say, a 90 or 120 min. cassette on hand to get the spool measurements?
posted by applemeat at 1:25 PM on March 20, 2010

applemeat, you don't need that math; cassette tapes move at 1+7/8 inch per second, so a 90 minute cassette would have had about 844 feet of tape, or about a sixth of a mile. A 120 minute cassete would have had about 1/4 mile of tape.
posted by localroger at 1:58 PM on March 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Like Thorzdad, I'd spend ages making mixtapes and compliations of artists greatests hits from vinyl that I owned or borrowed from friends (remember sneakernet? One guy bought a new album and the next week we'd all siphoned our favorite song from it).

I kept the tapes in five or my closet drawers, all with white paper-labels and either red or green stickers with number marks in the left hand corner, arranged by numbers. In the top drawer was a card index where you could look up the tapes arranged by musician. A friend saw this and said "That's beyond nerdy, that's serial killer nerdy." I only have a few left, I couldn't keep the collection up when moving. But I still have all my vinyl!
posted by dabitch at 4:16 PM on March 20, 2010

A dozen years ago I was in a music store that was getting out of the cassette business. They had taken all their cassettes, poured them loose into medium-sized boxes, shrink-wrapped them, and were selling them for $10/box. I only bought one. I figure it had about 200 tapes in it.

I kept the box on the floorboard in the car. Every time I reached in I got a new album I'd never heard before. They were all pretty awesome, even the terrible ones.

Somebody stole that car, tapes and all. A tragedy.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 5:33 PM on March 20, 2010

Instant access to almost any recording has left some of us over-stimulated, endlessly consuming without really digesting what we hear.

I find the opposite to be true. Considering that I'd be listening to however many non-infinite number of cassettes I could reasonably have on hand, I knew that I would be listening to each one many, many times. Sometimes with new tapes, I'd find myself deliberately not listening with all my effort, to save some of the musical content for later repeat listenings.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:44 PM on March 20, 2010

Anyone have, say, a 90 or 120 min. cassette on hand to get the spool measurements?

Localroger is wrongo: C90s were 45 minutes (x2 sides == "90"), so ( 1.875in/s * 60s * 45m / 12ft) = 421.875ft which still seems awfully long for some reason.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 2:14 PM on March 23, 2010