In this video, Chris Randall (Analog Industries) demonstrates one way to use a cassette four-track recorder as a performance instrument.
Randall describes it as “A quick demo of using a cassette 4-track as an instrument. (Or: How to get a Cm7 chord in to your song the hard way.)”
Randall uses a Tascam Portastudio 414. If you’ve tried something similar with different gear, share the details in the comments!
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It’s an amazing technique! I have done something similar with a Yamaha MT100. Here is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcYE-kQ0lGY
Very nice! Loved the bass patch! Really fat.
haha, i made this exact same video two years ago – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxi7RwFSKEg
Another excellent example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxi7RwFSKEg
This guy uses a reverb together with the pitch control to create some really interesting pads.
I was also inspired by that video of Cortini when it came out a while back. I made a loop tape out of a cassette and did some moody works with my Portastudio, a monotron, and a kaossilator…
http://synthhacker.blogspot.com/2014/02/portastudio-live-looping.html
Chip
Great job. I wish he would have explained the process of getting Abelton to feed into the four track record.
4 tracks are instruments in their own right. Here’s an improvised audio track using only a tascam 424 and a fostex xr5 with a couple of reverb and delays. https://youtu.be/T1g_35MrmBs
i made a short song a while back with a 4 track
it went ka thunk dunk bunk bang
basically the sound of it be thrown into the trash at long distance
it just want to be repaired
Just started messing with this over the last couple of weeks — I needed to use the mixer on the four-track and the recording part of the unit started begging for attention. Rather than use a straight recorded pad? On the first piece, we recorded two different tracks of two different sequences, each with a different voice and processing, all four tracks having the speed of the sequence steadily hand-modulated so that they interact in a chaotic fashion. All this was done in the note of D to be used as a drone track.
This worked so well I did another drone track but for this I recorded an electric guitar-type sound using a similarly randomly-varied timing with one note per track so it formed a Cmaj7 when all four tracks played at once. I ran the sound through a slowed attack and a series of delays when recording, then put the whole shebang through chorus, tremelo, a low-pass filter to cut out the nasty highs, and a nice ridiculous underwater reverb.
This could get to be a habit.