Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape

I always had a lot of fun making mix tapes. Of course, there were those frustrating times when the song you chose for the last one on a side would be just a few seconds too long and the tape would run out.

More often though, there would be a little chunk of tape left and I hated to leave it blank. There were a few short songs like Elvis Costello's Welcome to the Working Week I would sometimes fall back on, but what I liked to do more was create my own funny stuff to run out the side.

One little gem that worked out great was the time I alternated Slim Whitman's caterwauling from the beginning of the song Indian Love Call with cartoon ghost noises from a kid's record. Hilarious!

There was a Frank Zappa recording that had the sound of a stylus skipping and grinding across a record that I loved to use when making a tape for a friend. I would begin with a few seconds of some goofy song that I knew they would hate, then the stylus would skate across the record and end up right at the beginning of a real rocker.

I miss those days.   

I also still use cassettes.  I probably have +/- 300 or so.  My first deck was an Aiwa FD-660, purchased in 1983, on which I made many recordings.  I also have a Nakamichi DR-10, purchased in the late 1990's.  My prize recordings include a couple of years worth of the *Milestones* program - a weekly Saturday evening 3 hour program of jazz hosted by Miles Willis on KPFT FM for many years.  After all the intervening years, those cassettes still sound amazingly good.

^^^ Cool. :-)

Just a heads up for you cassetters ... check out the thrift stores for tapes. They sell for around twenty-five cents. You can pick up the really high-end Maxell and TDK tapes and just erase them with the bulk tape erasers and you're good to go. It is also fun to hear what the previous owners taped onto them. Believe it or not, there are people out there in the world who listen to some really terrible music, recorded off of some really terrible equipment.*lol*

Frank

Two old farts together then Frank!
Have two Nak decks, 660zx and zx7.
And about 600 tapes.... lol
And still recording on them to this day, usually something I have streamed that I liked but maybe not enough to buy on vinyl.
TDK SA are my weapons of choice in the tape world!

Nice. Thanks for posting. 

I still have cassettes, and record LPs on my Nakamichi cassette deck to play in the car. But I'm an old fart, so what do I know?

Frank