When I was a kid, my family had a late 1950s/early 1960s Grundig reel-to-reel portable tape deck. I don’t really know why my father bought it, because the only home recordings I can recall were of my siblings and I playing the recorder (badly), and an attempt to tape an episode of Top of The Pops on BBC TV.
Although simple in design, it was actually quite cumbersome to use. The motor and the electronics generated significant machine hum which leaked on to the audio. It was mono, but offered 4 tracks – 2 in each direction – and in theory, it could record overdubs and play both signals back together, if only you could sync the play and record heads. Years later, I used it as a guitar amp, but I could only hear this auxiliary signal if the deck was in “play” or “record” mode – so I would have it on “pause” all the time, which tended to stretch and tear any tape.
Nevertheless, it sparked my life-long interest in tape, which took off when I eventually acquired my own tape deck in the early 1970s. The humble “compact cassette tape”, when combined with a portable record and playback machine, was the way many young people got into making their own music. Not only did these machines often include a built-in radio (vital for recording John Peel sessions on BBC radio 1), they also enabled live overdubbing (and cassette duplicating with twin-deck tape-to-tape functionality). I had a portable cassette player in the early 1980s that had a built-in stereo microphone as well as proper audio inputs for external sources such as guitars, keyboards, microphones and record players. So it was possible to not just make mixtapes but also make your own home recordings, which could sound pretty decent. I even played around with tape loops, and splicing cassettes, but in a pretty amateurish way. A friend had a Tascam 4-track Cassette Portastudio, in the mid-80s, on which I made some demos of my own music.
Cassettes were a way to produce and circulate music cheaply, and there was a cottage industry of bands and labels distributing albums on cassette, via mail order, using small ads in the weekly music papers. (I own an original copy of one such self-released cassette from 1981, which last sold on-line for over US$180.) Less scrupulously, you could go to somewhere like Camden Market on the weekend and buy a tape of a gig you’d been to just a few nights before.
But, with the arrival of read/write CDs, Digital Audio Tape, MiniDiscs and Digital Compact Cassette, the analogue compact cassette fell out of favour in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And then the music industry decided to discontinue most of these newer formats, because of the increased risk of piracy and bootleg recordings.
Yet, the compact cassette still survives today, alongside a renewed interest in tape loops, and the early pioneers of electronic music and musique concrète. New albums and reissues are being released on cassette, and for a number of years there was Cassette Store Day as a sort of adjunct to its bigger vinyl sibling. Stock of new blank cassettes can still be found for sale on-line, and the format has outlived some of those digital successors that suffer from a lack of suitable playback equipment, or software/hardware compatibilities in the digital age.
Even today, in my current music recording setup of MIDI controllers, computers and software like Ableton Live, I use digital plugins based on tape decks, to emulate tape itself, or to replicate early looping effects, or simply to apply some “analogue” limitations to my work.
Next week #5: Home Electronics Kits
