Cassettes are my favorite form of audio media. They cheap and plentiful in the thrift stores of my youth. Both mass produced and local DIY tapes wound up sunbaked in my hand-me-down minivan's tape deck. Endlessly [1] recordable and five screws away from experimentation, they invite home use, personalization, and tinkering. Cassettes don't take themselves seriously. They are best after being broken in with a dozen playthroughs and christened with a hasty Sharpie label.
I've purchased hundreds of small-batch, home-dubbed tapes from underground music scenes across the US: spray painted grindcore tapes, a musique concrete release screwed into a wood plank, a midwest emo releases with a hand-drawn J-card, a stash of jungle tapes that my favorite DJ in Oakland sold out of his jacket pocket. I love the affordability and personality of these tapes.
Yet, I've had never actually put together a concerted tape release for my own music project or anyone else. I've had a tape deck and an absurd number of throwaway mass-market tapes at my disposal in everything living space I've occupied since college, but nothing I'd be willing to sell even if it was just to cover shipping. I have a drawer full of demos, field recordings, and live sets but nothing worthy of distributing.
Having crested the age of 30, it's been harder for me to get out to shows in the DIY music scene. I may not be 16 with nothing to do but hang out in a grungy basement, but I can still try to contribute to the community. I know enough about cassettes that I can run a small-edition tape release. Despite living in a relatively small town, there's still a kickass DIY scene. Watching local emo/punk outfit Checked Out mirror perform a packed show at Sans Backup Plan Recordsmirror and then offer to spraypaint their logo on anyone's shirt using a stencil woke me up from my long paternity leave from the punk scene. I wanted to do something for them but it wasn't until a few months later that I talked to the guys about it.
"Hey, do you have any tapes?"
"I think we're all out, sorry!"
"I've always wanted to make a tape release, could I make you guys a few?"
"Oh, what? Sure!"
After that vague promise to people I'd only met in passing, I spent the next set thinking about how I'd actually execute it. Given the CD I had picked up from them had "The Minecraft Movie" wryly scrawled on it in Sharpie, I figured I would be hard pressed to make something too amateur. I have plenty of tapes, I have the equipment, I have the vague notion of how things work, and I have some time between child rearing to operate a dubbing system. With their next performance coming up at a punk rock flea market the following weekend I also had a deadline. It was time to do it.
I'm sure there are more correct ways of doing this (such as ordering shells, cutting tape to length, etc), but this is how I did it cheaply and quickly.
First, I took the release mirror and looked how the tracks were divided. Fortunately, the band had the created two roughly 20 minute halves of the album in hopes of one day pressing a record. Sorry guys, I don't have a vinyl press, but this foresight helped with cassettes too! As cassette tapes are generally measured in minutes of runtime (C60, C90, C100 being 60, 90, and 100 minutes of respective total runtime), I was looking for tapes of roughly 40 minutes in length.
Next, I needed to find tapes that would fit the album length nicely. A few years back I went to an estate sale of an older couple who had some kind of natural foods side hustle in the 80s and used a Singer filmstrip projector [2] to run pre-recorded presentations. I came away with the projector, screen, and a massive box of old stock cassette tapes of a few different lengths. As a result, I had about 50 blank white tapes with a 47-minute run time. Consistency in the shell is nice but this would leave over three minutes of silence at the end of each side. While I've bought plenty of DIY cassettes with too much tape to spare, I wanted to try to get within 60 seconds from the last track of a side to the end of the spool. Besides, what fun is a DIY tape release without some grungy character.
All cassettes, as far as I am aware, are writable. This is probably obvious to anyone who lived through the 1980's but mass-market audio cassettes have two write-protection notches on top of the tapes. This prevents you from accidentally recorsing over your favorite Kenny Loggins release. However, if you do want to take the highway to the danger zone you can just slap a piece of tape over the holes and bam your tape deck will happily blast over anything. I'd done this for years when making tape loops, but I never paid too much attention to tape lengths. That would change.
Pre-recorded tapes come with write-protection. Each notch corresponds to one side of the tape with the notch on the left providing protection for the side that is being viewed. In this case "Friends For Life"'s B-side has been covered with scotch tape so it can be overwritten. Sorry, Debby.
Blank cassettes come with no write protection. After recording, the notches can be pressed in to prevent accidentally recording on top of the previous recording.
At risk of getting into the weeds when really you can just dub your tapes onto C60s and be done with it, my process of seeking out appropriately sized tapes led me to a few interesting discoveries about the medium.
Tapes, even ones that come pre-recorded, often have a little line gauge beneath the tape window which indicates the total length of the cassette once all of the tape has been rewound onto the supply reel. Given many mass-produced tapes were cut to release-length as part of the manufacturing process, varied in tape thickness, and lived their lives in very different environmental conditions, eyeballing the tape on the reel only gives you a ballpark estimate of how much media is really at your disposal.
This new age tape is a bit over 50 minutes of runtime so maybe 25-to-27 minutes on each side.
Thus, the tape deck counter earns its keep. For much of my time with tapes I paid little heed to the incrementing and decrementing number on my cassette players. I'd naïvely assumed it measured seconds since last reset. But no! Tape deck counters measure the number of rotations that have been taken by the supply reel. So not only is the counter not measuring seconds, the angular velocity is changing on the supply reel as it unspools mirror and the counter isn't constant during the duration of playback [3]. I'm assuming my TEAC W-600R mirror is using this same less-than-precise timing mechanism. Even if it has something fancier, I'd take the advice of tape heads that no two machines will keep time exactly the same mirror. Thus began the process of timing out my tapes on a single machine. Thankfully, the fast-forward function exists!
The blank C47s I have are around 365 revolutions-of-the-supply-reel long. Both Side A and Side B of the Checked Out album came out to around 324 revolutions. So any tape I was going to use needed to be long enough to fit all of the tracks but not so long that it wouldn't be smarter to just use a C47. I gathered several dozen cassettes which looked to be roughly 40-50 minutes long and wouldn't be missed (sorry Dolly, sorry Kenny Rogers, sorry get-rich-quick schemes). I put this cohort through the tape deck and annotated the counter read-out on top of each cassette. If I was a careful person I would have been hitting the read head with rubbing alcohol after each pass but I'm going for a grimy sound here. What use is a hyper sanitary dubbing station when all of these tapes have probably spent years on hot car dashboards.
Tapes that fell outside the 324-365 rev. sweet spot. Maybe next time, friends.
Like many tape decks the TEAC W-600R has two bays that allow for automatic dubbing. I'd only need to record from the source one time onto a single master tape. All subsequent cassettes could be quickly copied from the master. Home Taping Killed Music mirror and it makes it so easy to save music too! I recorded the master by compiling the digital tracks for each side in Audacity mirror and playing it back via a 3.5mm jack into the tape deck's stereo RCA inputs [4]. Each side of the master was recorded at real-time speed. I listened to the full tape once through to ensure there were no defects [5]. It was time to start dubbing.
I often wonder if that monstera is finding what it's looking for inside my stereo rack
As I was planning an edition of 10 tapes, I picked out 10 cassettes that fit within the length constraints I described above. Each had their turn in the recirding bay while the master tape kept on working. As the tapes didn't perfectly match the length of the master, I had to dub each side individually (rather than use the fancy automated one-press-for-both-sides feature). But the ability to sub at 2x speed still allowed me to complete the dubbing over the course of a single day while engaged in othee projects and childcare.
As fun as it is to know what came pre-recorded on a tape before its DIY makeover, I figured I could try to improve the presentation somewhat by printing tape labels on some sticker paper. Given the release I was running already had album art, I figured I'd aim for consistency and just rip the text. A half hour in Inkscape and a half hour with an xacto knife and and I had 20 sticker labels, one for each side of the tape. To make sure I wasn't doing too good of a job (but again mostly out of laziness), I used inkjet sticker sheets in my laser peinter. You'd think in our sophisticated, modern age this wouldn't matter but it does. The ink smudged just enough to look perfectly grungey.
When I initially started working on the tapes I wasn"t sure if I was going to print out the J-cards mirror. But after having all the tapes lined up, I couldn't help myself. I did my best to adapt the goofy album art to a portrait aspect ratio and printed it out on some cardstock on my crappy color printer. There's a nice print shop in town I could have used for a cool double-sided insert but that's not as DIY! It's also worth noting some of the best J-cards I've seen were hand-drawn. No wrong answers.
Two dozen folds later and I had 10 tapes ready to go out and hopefully see some action in someone's tape player. While I put an edition number on each tape and insert, I didn't put a catalog number mirror on the tape. Would be weird of me to claim a release when it has the quality of a bootleg, right? I've since assigned it the catalog number Nullbrok Tapes NULL00.
I would be misleading the reader to suggest the time spent this project was strictly altruistic. I love Checked Out's music and promoting cassette tape culture but what I really wanted out of this was to purchase friendship and an entrance into the local punk community.
One week after I committed to this little tape release, I got an hour's leave from my family to go
to the punk rock flea market, an array of artists and local vendors squeezed into a
church-turned-event-center. I strolled through
the aisles that had developed the decidedly sour-smelling aspect of a mosh pit. I geeked out with
some linocut artists and flipped through a healthy array of zines. Failing to find the Checked Out dudes, I chatted with the Slutzville mirror
Slutzvillains who, as far as I can tell,
are the linchpin of the local punk community. Not only did they summon Checked Out for me, they also
asked
if I'd interested in repressing their releases on tape! NULL01 is now underway complete.
From a few hours of work pressing buttons on a tape deck I got a hug, a "holy shit", many thank-you's, and a new assignment. Getting into the know is hard mode as an aging inter-state transplant with minor social anxiety and no Instagram account. But spending the time to give back to musicians beyond direct financial contributions helps me feel connected even when I'm not able to make it to all the shows I might have had the time for when I was younger. I've also rekindled my love for all things tape media. Catch me at the next house show with a VHS-C camcorder.
I don't know how many of these releases I'll be able to complete given I have another kid on the way. I'm just going to keep hawking my services and gathering tapes to make sure each future album gets a full-assed DIY treatment.
Even forty years past their prime cassettes remain a viable means of distributing music. Inexpensive tape decks, Walkman players, and used cassettes by the pound are still plentiful at second-hand shops, garage sales, and in the family attic. The tape medium checks all the boxes of the DIY ethos. Anyone can gather some tapes and share their album with no subscription services, no platform fees, no massive capital outlay, and no censorship. Dub your own music, dub your friends' music, hell, go ahead and make a real mixtape for someone special.
There's no need to wait until you have the perfect equipment or know-how. Home-dubbed tapes carry not only the character of the recording artist but the character of the community they came from. Keep it weird, keep it open, and keep it human.
[1] Or until the magnetic coating wears off
[2] Which is worth a post of it's own. The 35mm filmstrip is synchronized to project with a cassette track, an automated 80s slideshow. It has very strong Beyond the Black Rainbow mirror vibes. Look at this thing. Sample 1 Sample 2 Sample 3
[3] If you can't tell I went down a bit of a rabbit hole here. A lot of interesting forum posts on the subject which preserve some of that slowly fading expertise with spooled analog formats. More details about tape speed regulation mirror
[4] The audiophile will point to higher fidelity solutions and probably put a mixing board between the two but an aux cable is good enough for punk music!
[5] I have several tapes from the Dayton, OH experimental music scene that have interesting sound artifacts. One has a few 2013-era Facebook Messenger notification sounds that always threw me for a loop. Several others have the infamous GSM buzz mirror from cellular interference mirror (which, TIL, apparently doesn't exist on modern cellular networks). I'd never hold these flaws against the creators of the tapes. It's a quirky snapshot in time.