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Cassette Fetish


ghostworks
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QUOTE (ucsteve667 @ Dec 11 2011, 01:21 PM)
QUOTE (Tony R @ Dec 11 2011, 05:35 AM)
I rarely bought releases on cassette, I preferred vinyl, but loved to make mix tapes for personal listening. Thrown them all out now except for a few 70s Rush boots.

Mix tapes were an artform, and I still have many of my old ones. Every now and then Ill do an hr of MY SHOW with the set list taken from such mixes. They seem to really hold the sentiment from the time they were made. My whole show is pretty much built on that format I guess

One show I was considering doing before I ended my show was duplicating my favorite mix tape I ever made from 1990. Maybe if I do my show again at some point I'll do that show - it was an amazing tape.

 

I used to be king of the mix tape - I made them for tons of people, and I went through a ridiculous amount of Maxell XLII tapes in my day.

 

I still have probably 500 tapes - I put them on Craigslist once, but only got some nibbles. Eventually I'll put them up for sale again - I want someone to be able to enjoy them as they represented countless hundreds of hours of love and enjoyment in the 80's, 90's and even a little beyond... wub.gif

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QUOTE (rushgoober @ Dec 11 2011, 06:18 PM)
QUOTE (ucsteve667 @ Dec 11 2011, 01:21 PM)
QUOTE (Tony R @ Dec 11 2011, 05:35 AM)
I rarely bought releases on cassette, I preferred vinyl, but loved to make mix tapes for personal listening. Thrown them all out now except for a few 70s Rush boots.

Mix tapes were an artform, and I still have many of my old ones. Every now and then Ill do an hr of MY SHOW with the set list taken from such mixes. They seem to really hold the sentiment from the time they were made. My whole show is pretty much built on that format I guess

One show I was considering doing before I ended my show was duplicating my favorite mix tape I ever made from 1990. Maybe if I do my show again at some point I'll do that show - it was an amazing tape.

 

I used to be king of the mix tape - I made them for tons of people, and I went through a ridiculous amount of Maxell XLII tapes in my day.

 

I still have probably 500 tapes - I put them on Craigslist once, but only got some nibbles. Eventually I'll put them up for sale again - I want someone to be able to enjoy them as they represented countless hundreds of hours of love and enjoyment in the 80's, 90's and even a little beyond... wub.gif

we should do a RUSH Mix Tape Off! heh

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re: mix tapes

 

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3251/2331268479_e3b41d3d6b.jpg

 

^ I bought this great book a few years ago at a close-out book store (the size is about 7" x 10")

 

you can still track it down very cheaply (Amazon/eBay/half.com etc)

 

if you have even a passing interest in mixtapes, you'll get an afternoon out of it

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QUOTE (rushgoober @ Dec 11 2011, 06:18 PM)
QUOTE (ucsteve667 @ Dec 11 2011, 01:21 PM)
QUOTE (Tony R @ Dec 11 2011, 05:35 AM)
I rarely bought releases on cassette, I preferred vinyl, but loved to make mix tapes for personal listening. Thrown them all out now except for a few 70s Rush boots.

Mix tapes were an artform, and I still have many of my old ones. Every now and then Ill do an hr of MY SHOW with the set list taken from such mixes. They seem to really hold the sentiment from the time they were made. My whole show is pretty much built on that format I guess

One show I was considering doing before I ended my show was duplicating my favorite mix tape I ever made from 1990. Maybe if I do my show again at some point I'll do that show - it was an amazing tape.

 

I used to be king of the mix tape - I made them for tons of people, and I went through a ridiculous amount of Maxell XLII tapes in my day.

 

I still have probably 500 tapes - I put them on Craigslist once, but only got some nibbles. Eventually I'll put them up for sale again - I want someone to be able to enjoy them as they represented countless hundreds of hours of love and enjoyment in the 80's, 90's and even a little beyond... wub.gif

I bought those Maxell XL ll blanks by the dozen.

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QUOTE (Hatchetaxe&saw @ Dec 11 2011, 03:52 PM)
...my Aiwa walkman(how pissed must Sony have been when we all called our many-branded portable cassette players "walkmen". Ah, the chauvinism! No walkwomen! Up the '80's!).
What type of walkman did you guys have? I loved Aiwa. And it had a rewind button. My earlier ones hadn't, just FF....FFS.

I had many, but my pride and joy was the Sharp CJ-520(GY)

 

no surprise, I still own it:

 

http://i.imgur.com/ADAEo.jpg

 

^ not only did it have auto reverse (endless cassettes!) and an anti-rolling mechanism (meaning that if you were walking fast/jogging, it wouldn't warble) - it had a THREE-BAND GRAPHIC EQ right on the front panel

 

as a teenager, there was nothing cooler to me than being able to fine-tune a mix on the fly

 

 

 

 

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Ghostworks I'm loving these photos! Maybe got the fetish too! tongue.gif

 

First cassette I ever bought was pyromania brand new. smile.gif

 

The best was when I realized that with the right ghetto blaster I could pull music right off the freakin radio!! What a revelation that was! I guess it was like the 80's version of "stealing" music off the Internet! Lol

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QUOTE (MMCXII @ Dec 12 2011, 04:57 AM)
...it was like the 80's version of "stealing" music off the Internet! Lol

^ it really was

 

a whole new world of music opened up for me when I got my first portable deck that would record

 

I (literally) spent hours parked in front of that thing, drawing in a notebook with one hand and keeping my finger on the pause button with the other

 

as soon as anything remotely cool came on I'd tape it

 

I became a fan of Rush, Men At Work, Duran Duran, Van Halen and Asia (among others) precisely because I liked what I heard on the radio, taped it, listened to it over and over, and ultimately (this is important) begged my parents to buy the album/tape for me

 

(I have a closet-full of Rush interviews and Dr. Demento shows I really ought to dig out)

Edited by ghostworks
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These are mine:

http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab352/Babycat4/2011-12-15160737.jpg

 

http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab352/Babycat4/2011-12-15161144.jpg

I've had these for quite a while.

2.gif

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I remember conversations with classmates about which LPs we owned and if you said "I've got it on tape", it usually meant you'd copied it from a mate and could NOT be counted as owned.

 

First real tape I owned was Signals and probably contributes to why I think this is the worst Rush album, Horrible format - I should have stuck to vinyl

 

Somewhere (loft, garage, shed?) I have a cracking AC/DC recording live at the Hammy Odeon, London, featuring Bon. The original programme was am 'In Concert' show on BBC radio and I recorded the show on a TDK C90 and had to flip the tape during the extended solo in Let There Be Rock. Oh, how I'd like to have that show on a CD!

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QUOTE (fritz44 @ Dec 17 2011, 12:46 PM)
I remember conversations with classmates about which LPs we owned and if you said "I've got it on tape", it usually meant you'd copied it from a mate and could NOT be counted as owned.

First real tape I owned was Signals and probably contributes to why I think this is the worst Rush album, Horrible format - I should have stuck to vinyl

Somewhere (loft, garage, shed?) I have a cracking AC/DC recording live at the Hammy Odeon, London, featuring Bon. The original programme was am 'In Concert' show on BBC radio and I recorded the show on a TDK C90 and had to flip the tape during the extended solo in Let There Be Rock. Oh, how I'd like to have that show on a CD!

Was it a performance from 1979? Because it's online. If you're not familiar with Usenet I can probably work something out to get it to you.

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QUOTE (fritz44 @ Dec 17 2011, 01:46 PM)
I remember conversations with classmates about which LPs we owned and if you said "I've got it on tape", it usually meant you'd copied it from a mate and could NOT be counted as owned.

First real tape I owned was Signals and probably contributes to why I think this is the worst Rush album, Horrible format - I should have stuck to vinyl

Somewhere (loft, garage, shed?) I have a cracking AC/DC recording live at the Hammy Odeon, London, featuring Bon. The original programme was am 'In Concert' show on BBC radio and I recorded the show on a TDK C90 and had to flip the tape during the extended solo in Let There Be Rock. Oh, how I'd like to have that show on a CD!
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I still have most of my cassettes. I've wondered how they would sound now. I'd like to get a cassette player just to find out. I'll put up some pictures soon, but I can tell you that I was still buying them into the 90s. ph34r.gif My first car, a Honda Civic hatchback, had a cassette player, and since that's where I spent most of my time and thus listening to music, I kept buying them. I must have at least 50 or so.
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QUOTE (sullysue @ Dec 18 2011, 12:48 AM)
...my first car, a Honda Civic hatchback, had a cassette player, and since that's where I spent most of my time and thus listening to music, I kept buying them.

yes.gif

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One of the best things I ever did was to record tapes of music that I bought in a given year. Music serves as a soundtrack to life and events and when I hear certain songs, it takes me back to those days.

 

My first one was 1979 - 1984 and included tunes in chronological order.

 

Then I eventually made one specifically for 1984 because there were so many songs that year that I wanted to include. It actually took up two cassette tapes!

 

Oftentimes, I bought songs that, at the time of purchase, was already an old tune. For instance, I bought "A Farewell to Kings" on Thanksgiving Eve in 1984, so I included "Cinderella Man" and "Madrigal" on my 1984 tape. So I often think back to the fall of 1984 when I hear those two tunes.

 

Anyway, I kept doing this up until 1995, which was probably the last year I accumulated music in mass volumes, because there was not much after that.

 

If I play any of those tapes, say 1989, a lot of great memories come back to me of that year.

Edited by circumstantial tree
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QUOTE (ghostworks @ Jan 9 2012, 09:34 AM)
QUOTE (sullysue @ Dec 18 2011, 12:48 AM)
...I'll put up some pictures soon, but I can tell you that I was still buying them into the 90s.  ph34r.gif

user posted image BUMP user posted image

Oops! I forgot to do that. Tonight, fo sho. I went through the box o' tapes a couple of weeks ago, and it really took me back. There are some really good ones in there. Next mission is to get a tape player.

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QUOTE (circumstantial tree @ Jan 9 2012, 10:40 AM)
One of the best things I ever did was to record tapes of music that I bought in a given year. Music serves as a soundtrack to life and events and when I hear certain songs, it takes me back to those days.

My first one was 1979 - 1984 and included tunes in chronological order.

Then I eventually made one specifically for 1984 because there were so many songs that year that I wanted to include. It actually took up two cassette tapes!

Oftentimes, I bought songs that, at the time of purchase, was already an old tune. For instance, I bought "A Farewell to Kings" on Thanksgiving Eve in 1984, so I included "Cinderella Man" and "Madrigal" on my 1984 tape. So I often think back to the fall of 1984 when I hear those two tunes.

Anyway, I kept doing this up until 1995, which was probably the last year I accumulated music in mass volumes, because there was not much after that.

If I play any of those tapes, say 1989, a lot of great memories come back to me of that year.

that's cool - basically, you were making 'year/s in review' comps!

 

and 'taking you back' is right on point, ss - in fact, sometimes the running order from a mixtape was/is so ingrained, I couldn't listen to the albums the separate tracks came from without hearing my mixtape selection

 

example:

 

1984 Mix - Side Two

1. The Fixx - Stand Or Fall

2. Men At Work - Down By The Sea

3. Rush - The Weapon

4. Genesis - It's Gonna Get Better...

 

^ whenever I hear any of those songs, I hear the song that follows it start to play in my memory - even though I've probably played 'Shuttered Room' and 'Signals' 1,000 times more as complete albums than as a mix, that mixtape running order is permanently encoded into my DNA

 

^ a testament to how 'important' music was to me as a young man - it was (literally) everything

 

I've even gone so far as to recreate some of my favorite mixtape running orders in media player playlists...

Edited by ghostworks
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nothing earth-shattering here, just a few Rush tapes that I picked out of the crates:

 

http://i.imgur.com/jme0W.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/jROq0.jpg

 

^ the original printing of ESL cassette contains the unimportant but slightly irritating misspelling of Xanadu ('Zanadu')

 

an odd p/g cover - the original title has been whited out (with the original 'Rush' logo enlarged but the title typed in generically)

 

by '84, many record companies were starting to design specifically to the dimensions of the full cassette cover rather than just cropping a tiny 2.5" x 2.5" copy of the LP cover (they started getting it right by '87)

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QUOTE (sullysue @ Jan 9 2012, 11:13 AM)
...next mission is to get a tape player.

trink39.gif

 

so - let's talk decks!

 

here's a few from the ghostworks vaults:

 

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e129/4WAT/CASSETTE/cas_KENKX620.jpg

Kenwood KX-620

 

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e129/4WAT/CASSETTE/cas_KENW1060.jpg

Kenwood KX-W1060

 

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and, oh boy... remember these?

 

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e129/4WAT/CASSETTE/cas_EMEMC1435.jpg

Emerson MC1435

 

^ yep - the old everything-in-one box

 

a record player, dual well tape deck, am/fm stereo... really, these machines were my 'gateway drug' into my studio production hobby/career

 

with a brick of blank tapes I could create anything - grab a track from an LP, another from a tape, record live from the radio (I still have tons of 'Rush' interview specials), even your own voice/music (if the stereo had a mic/aux in... and most did)

 

I used to make my own radio shows - I'd act as the DJ, introduce the tracks etc.

 

later, I got into 'sound collage', cutting pieces of tracks together with quick edits of am radio evangelists, children's stories 45's etc.

Edited by ghostworks
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