Cassette tape as an effect
As it has a distinct sound of its own, you can use cassette tape as an effect.
It's a bit tedious, as it involves taking your pristine sound, recording it to cassette tape in realtime, rewinding the tape, and playing it back again in realtime... but it has a grungy, low fidelity sound that can be overdriven in a pleasing way.
Quotes
I love the sounds on the R-8, but I play them to some of my rappers and they think they're terrible — they want to hear a snare from 400 years ago played through a cassette. What the hell is all this technology for? The whole point of having samples is for the people who want to hear those old sounds.
— Simon Harris, 1989[1]
A lot of the noises we get, we record them onto cassette first so that it's worse quality. Then we sample them off the cassette. Like, we'll distort the sound so that it's a bad sample, but it just sounds good 'cos it's bad!
— Gez Varley, LFO, 1991[2]
I have a lot of tape machines and all sorts of things, just to get certain sounds. I really like analogue tape, but my big problem is what happens to the signal over time. So therefore, if you just record to analogue and then straight back to DAT, it's quite nice.
— Richard D. James (Aphex Twin), 1997[3]
References
- "The Bassment Tapes" Tim Goodyer, Music Technology, Sep 1989, pp. 44—49
- "Deep Vibrations" Simon Trask, Music Technology, Aug 1991, pp. 60—65
- "Twin Speaks" Steve La Cerra, EQ, Jun 1997
Cassette tape: Cassette tape as a data storage format | Cassette tape as an effect
