I fucking love tapes. listening to tapes, recording onto tapes, re-recording tapes over and over to wear them out, splicing tapes to make loops, buying used tape lots to find memories nearly lost in a dusty basement or storage unit.
I love tape players and the different unique audio aspects associated with each one. multitrack tape consoles, microcassette recorders (dictaphone), old handheld players (walkman), shoebox, and dual cassette desk units; I own several of each [1] and absolutely love them. tape is my favorite physical medium, by far.
ah, nostalgia
tape ties, er, tapes, me to my childhood, and in a way, is an apt metaphor to the distant memory of it. it degrades over time, but still carries a distinct quality I enjoy replaying over and over again. a quality that requires care to maintain a healthy relationship with [2]. each repeat play wears out the tape/memory a little more.
okay you love tapes, now what
well, you guessed it. with the hothouse/daisyseed (what all chaon effects are built on), I have the platform to emulate and control different player models and tape characteristics; controls for wear modes of the heads and tapes, with fine grain controls for wow and flutter, compression, and distortion. I can even add in a looper for sound on sound or overdub recording/playback.
don’t get out ahead of yourself just yet
there’s still a lot of research and building to do for this type of effect. I’ve never built looping functionality, let alone getting each of the emulation modes to even remotely sound like the players and tapes they target. anything is possible with digital, but will I be able to actually capture the likeness of the originals?
anyway, that’s the goal, and I’m documenting the journey to get there.
[1] … except for multi-track consoles. that TASCAM 424 is too expensive for me to slam down $400 and still requiring work to fix. but they are really cool. some day when I take the time to take on that project…
[2] men… go to therapy. then go back to therapy. and do it again. growth is good for you, and sometimes we all need help to get there. you’re serving the people in your life by making an effort to make yourself better. when you change yourself, you change the world.