Electronic Music 411 - Simple Pleasures: 4 track music - tape, cassette, analog, guitar, audio

I had this old 4 track tape recorder sitting in a bin up in my closet for the past couple years. In fact, I’ve even made multiple attempts to sell it, but nobody was interested in paying the exorbitant ($75?!) price. I never got around to using it too much because it was such a hassle compared to my normal recording equipment. Well, I think i’ll hold onto it for a while.

I think there’s a special place in hell for people who are nostalgic for things they were never involved with or were too young to really experience. And I think there’s a lot of people going there. Seeing as how I was 7 years old when the 80’s ended, I can’t say that I was really around for the heyday of cassette music and 4 track recordings. By the time I was really getting into producing music and working with sound, digital recording was already cheap and standardized. So, for me, tape has always just been a special medium that I can use to get a different sound.

There’s something magical about tape, though. A special sound. Especially on this cheap old recording equipment made for home usage. The wandering pitch, the hissing. the tape saturation. Stuff recorded to tape gets old and crusty just like we do. It forgets little bits and pieces, but most of the signal is still there. In a way, it’s kind of like human memory. In a way, it’s kind of human!

I think that is where the big difference lies between older mediums and the new digital empire. When you listen to streaming mp3 radio, or whatever, it will be exactly the same every single time, down to the millisecond. Radio broadcasts are a tiny bit different, depending on the weather, which direction the antennae is pointing. How much dust is on that vinyl record. Old keyboards drifting pitch with the room temperature.

Digital technology only exacerbates our tendency to try and make everything perfect and repeatable–a tendency that I think is completely alien to nature. Our very existence owes itself to random mutations in our genetic code. If our ancestors repeated themselves perfectly each generation, we would have never moved past the complexity of a single celled organism.

But, digital technology is stable and predictable. It makes my work a lot easier and faster. I find myself always looking for ways to make it feel more human, though. Sometimes, that’s recording something to tape. Or sending a sound through a gong. Or recording some sounds from an old record, or a street sign.

Anyway, enough pontificating. I made a few tracks with the magic-voodoo setup you see in the picture up there. These tracks were made with only guitar, my fostex x-15 4 track tape recorder, and, admittedly, a lot of effects

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This track was fun, two tracks of 'bass drone' from the guitar, and two tracks of wailing pitch sliding, one of my favorite sorts of sounds

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This one is me playing with the editing facilities of the 4 track.. mostly just the pause button and the pitch wheel really
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And a big murky drone
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This blog is also posted up at my Golden Master blog.. just thought it would be fun to share this one here, too.
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