The fun bygone days of making your own cassettes

[Lord Reith]

Despite all the technological wizardry we have at our beck and call these days, I often wonder if I was not actually happier back in the "olden" days of the 1980s.

My first Beatles albums I would copy to a cheap battery powered mono cassette recorder. It was horrible quality and, of course, you would lose the novelty of Beatles Stereo so I never did too many of those. But for my birthday in 1981 I got a Hitachi stereo cassette/FM radio with DIN input and I thought it was just the best thing since sliced bread.

It was so much fun making a compilation cassette back then. First you'd have to plan it all out of course, which would involve making a long list of potential tracks organised by some theme... or often as not reproducing one of the foreign albums listed in the back of Nicholas Shaffner's book. Then getting each record out and cuing up the track, releasing the pause button on the recorder at just the right moment, putting the record away and often as not getting it out all over again for another track further down the list. Telling my mum to tread softly as she went past lest the thudding of her footsteps be preserved on the tape.

At my side I would have The TDK Guide To Better Recording which was a free colour booklet available at record stores. I would follow all the instructions contained within to the letter, imagining myself as some kind of audio expert engaged in important archival work (instead of just a kid with some records and a ghetto blaster, which doesn't seem quite as romantic).

Doing the cassette labels could be just as much fun. I spent many hours searching for and trying out different box labels. My least favourite - although the easiest to find - were Realistic brand (Tandy) which were a uniform light blue. Some of the TDK labels had small checkboxes with such arcane terms as "Noise Reduction: Dolby B, Dolby C", "Bias type", "Recording date" etc which were all great fun to fill out manually - using a typewriter of course. My typewriter had three colours (green as well as blue and red) so i would use different colours for different information on the labels. For instance, the album title might be in Blue, the track listing in red, and sources (for bootleg recordings) in green.

Even finding ways to store the cassettes was fun. You could store them in those awful fiddly plastic racks that fitted together with each other like lego, or you could buy what looked like video cases with moulded plastic trays for the bare cassettes to fit into. I had a set of five of these with faux-leather bindings, which I used for the most prestigious of my cassette compilations ie: all bootleg material. Later on I got one of those sets of drawers with three compartments for storing up to 36 tapes. I also had a faux black leather version with red felt interior (posh eh?) and a handle that could be used to take up to 12 tapes on location (like, my friend's house).

I really started getting anal when I ditched the pre-made cassette labels and started making my own using a typewriter and a photocopier. I would type out all the different parts for the cover, and then use a photocopier to shrink the different parts and then cut and paste them into a larger-than-actual-size cover... which would in turn be shrunk down to cassette size. The great thing about this was that you could also add pictures... albeit in black and white.

In short, you could while away many happy hours or days (weeks?) making up these special items, and find pleasure in displaying and showing them off. The other day i made up a BBC compilation using the playlist function on my phone, and it took me less than five minutes. But do I get any greater pleasure out of listening to it? No. I was much happier fiddling about with my cassettes and typewriter when I was 17.

There is probably a moral to all of this, but I don't know what it is.

[ToddS]

I'm still making my own cassette tapes !

[mojofilter]

I spent the 1970s and 1980s and most of the 1990s in front of a cassette deck. There are boxes in the closet with over 400 tapes I made, which are all obsolete. I have everything that was on them from digital sources now, but I can't bear to throw them out. And I still have the tapes I got in mail trades, before it was possible to make your own CD.

[Lord Reith]

And I still have the tapes I got in mail trades, before it was possible to make your own CD.

I think I still have those but pretty sure I don't have my old cassette compliations. At some point I would have htought "Why am I keeping these?" Of course when you throw stuff out, you never think about the nostalgic value it will hold for you in 20 years time.

I'm still making my own cassette tapes !

Ha ha! Good for you!

If I had space I would create a retro room, with a cassette deck, a stereo "receiver" as they were once called, two gigantic speakers (that somehow were less loud than an average sized modern bluetooth speaker), a vhs player and a square tv with legs. Phones and anything else like that would have to be left at the door.

[Nimbus]

I have everything that was on them from digital sources now, but I can't bear to throw them out.

You and me both. I have the about 200 cassettes and the same number of minidiscs that I can't let go. Unlike most, I still have the means to play them on my Yamaha deck and Sony MD deck that get used regularly. I also have a few sealed metal and chrome TDK tapes that go for a decent price on Ebay, but no, I might need them one day Whatever happened to TDK ?

One day in the not to distant future they will part of a house clearance, no doubt. Banished to landfill or incineration

[mojofilter]

I didn't tape any radio specials that I remember, except one. I have probably an hour off a local station where people were calling in, in shock and disbelief, crying on the air because John was murdered that evening. I don't think I can ever listen to it again - the first time was hard enough.

On the other hand, I have a small stash of airchecks from long-defunct radio stations in the Toronto broadcast area. They don't last long, but they're a time capsule of a time we'll never see again. I have a tape of me winning the "Joke Of The Day" one morning, (my first time on the radio) but I didn't make it to "Joke Of The Week" because somebody won with the world's lamest joke. I have an aircheck from a station in Buffalo that proves the Wikipedia article on it wrong. It says they dropped their call letters for new ones in 1970, but my tape shows that in 1973, they were still called WYSL. I got a great, psychedelic commercial for the House Of Lords (unisex hairdressing salon) made by the people at CHUM-FM that played on WBEN-FM in Buffalo. I have at least one of their jingles, too. I talked to Little Richard, and Pete Best on The Larry King Show (before he was on TV, in fact he was on the long-defunct Mutual Radio Network). The tape that I treasure the most aside from my first time on the radio is the late evening I recorded The Kings ("This Beat Goes On / Switchin' To Glide") performing live at the radio studio for about an hour on a popular talk show. It took me until the 2010s to find out what date that one was recorded. The station kept no record, the host, on a new station, couldn't remember, The Kings couldn't remember. The guys in the band heard my tape when I had it on YouTube, and we corresponded a bit, but it's been gone from the web since about 2011. I wish there was some way I could share this kind of thing with interested parties.

[InnerLight]

I hated looking at the sea of white nondescript spines and inserts of homemade cassettes. I would spend a considerable amount of time making custom artwork for them by using whatever magazines and mail I had at the moment and creating collage sort of artwork and ransom note like spine text.

I too still have pretty much all of my cassettes and a cassette deck.

[bobzilla]

At some point in my teens (when I had the time and energy to devote to things), I decided that it was too much work to find whatever specific Beatles song I was looking for in the album cassettes, so I bought a bunch of blank cassettes and made "singles" so that I would have one song per side of a cassette. I went in alphabetical order and would figure out which of the two songs I was putting on that single was the longest. I would record it onto one side and then I would take the cassette apart, cut the remaining tape and remove it, and then put the tape back together and record the other side.

[skynet]

And I still have the tapes I got in mail trades, before it was possible to make your own CD.

I think I still have those but pretty sure I don't have my old cassette compliations. At some point I would have htought "Why am I keeping these?" Of course when you throw stuff out, you never think about the nostalgic value it will hold for you in 20 years time.

I'm still making my own cassette tapes !

Ha ha! Good for you!

If I had space I would create a retro room, with a cassette deck, a stereo "receiver" as they were once called, two gigantic speakers (that somehow were less loud than an average sized modern bluetooth speaker), a vhs player and a square tv with legs. Phones and anything else like that would have to be left at the door.

Still doing my tapes as well, although i have less time these days, i still enjoy taking time to do this , storing them, well that is another story, the rack in the picture just shows full capacity but i have some of them in boxes like the ZII that you can see above, fun nevertheless .... oh the good old days (sorry about the mess you see in the pic btw, my "Beatles Room" is "an organized disorder" )

[Kwai Chang]

Finally! I've met someone else who owns a Percentage Wheel!!!
I really liked graphic arts and was briefly amused enough to think it could be a career.
But, it was probably the weekly parties that we would throw that made it all secondary. I was lucky enough to be connected to a steady source of controlled sacraments that were actually enjoyable. Unlike today, whereby anyone can purchase a DMT equivalent of a Saturn V(Salvia Divinorum) if you were lucky enough to have some stability and poise, you might find sponsorship(insider referral) and be permitted passage to otherworldly realms that required plenty of non-alcoholic hydration and a bunch of custom made cassette tapes that would get played in an order that might have been labelled 'Pre-game', 'Count-Down', 'Lift-off', 'Van Allen Belts', 'Re-entry', 'Splash-down', Recovery/Breakfast! The last of those NOT being a C90 but, a menu at whoever was serving breakfast that had enough seating! The better the sacraments, the better the quality of the 'dj'(THAT was always...ME!!!).
I made a ton of money ....was the guaranteed sure thing...gave most of it(sacraments...and tapes) away for free! Somehow, this went on for 5 or 6 years. Then I was worried about things that MIGHT happen...and that ruined everything.
Nothing happened!
Where ARE my tapes???
I'm sure many of them are in trophy cases or mounted on the wall next to some taxidermist's unfortunate finery.
I even had a promo t-shirt(baseball long-sleeved) from TDK that was Red/Black. The back said 'TDK's New Hi-Bias' or something...
The front said
"How Do You Say
AUDUA???"
The Olden Days------>1980-1987
KC