Making Your own Tapes

[theinquisitor]

So I've been thinking about producing my own tapes and have no idea how to go about it (at all). Can someone give me a basic rundown of the full process and answer some questions:
1) What do you use to record audio onto the tape and what's the most efficient way to go about it?

2)What process do you think is best for transferring logos etc. onto the tape?

3) What sort of paper (thickness etc.) do you use for the sleeve?

4) best place to order tapes/cases to the UK

Thanks guys

[olofdigre]

4) tapeline.info/v2/

3) If I do it semi-professional I order printondemand-postcards. from wherever. like 182 x 117 mm Flat Cards from www.vistaprint.co.uk/ and folde them once.

2) glue and scissors and copy machine or just photoshop

1) tapeline.info/v2/ or with a doubledecker taperecorder

[nahadoth]

1. When producing this release below, I used an old boombox found at my work which had both a CD player and cassette deck - I burned the audio to a CD, and then made a cassette master taping it off of there. I have a dual cassette deck Boombox at home, so once I had made the master, I could duplicate tapes from that pretty easily.

2. The one time I produced a cassette below (over 5 years ago, of some songs I wrote and recorded, still have some in stock) - I ordered a special rubber stamp with just the name of the project and album in an agreeable font, then used a thinned acryllic paint and stamped on the surface. It took forever to dry, which is why I chose to leave it blank this time through. If you have access to a printer, it may be possible to order label stickers and either have them professionally printed, or you just put blank stickers on a cassette and draw on those so the brand info etc is covered up. But even if you're just using commercial blank cassettes, there is an argument for leaving them unlabeled - given that early 'editions' of dungeon synth were often released in these conditions, this can be a nice throwback.

3. I've used 110lb cardstock as well as regular copy paper. Depends on the type of printer you're using, really - if it's a copier, the cardstock can get jammed, so just be careful.

4. n/a to me



I finally ordered some tapes for the Solstice release, but in the mean time I started working with a small stash of commercial tapes I found in storage to make a small run of my first album to have at a show I'm doing soon.

[theinquisitor]

Thanks for the replies.

I've found a tape duplicator that is available cheaply but it only duplicates in mono. What are your thoughts on duplicators and do you think the tapes being recorded in mono will be a particular problem?

[nahadoth]

Is it one of those machines with 16 decks or something? Can't beat em for speed - the ability to do 15 copies high speed at a time is very useful. With those I believe you can also use tabs-out cassettes which are somewhat cheaper depending on the source. The downside is they do produce some duds, so it's good to have a few more tapes than you need.

As for mono, it will only be a problem if you're relying on stereo separation in your mix, like a song only sounds right to you because the strings are in the right channel, and the piano is in the left or something. You can mix to mono, which some engineers prefer doing.

[theinquisitor]

Its a 1 to 3. It goes at 16x the speed, will there be a massive loss of quality?

[thekeeper]

I always do real time dubbing, one tape at a time. It takes a lot of time, but I've dubbed some hundreds of tapes like this over the year and I don't mind it. Duplicators lessen the quality a bit, adds some of the 'tape sound' effect to it, but I don't think it's that big of a deal or overly noticeable, especially for DS. Real-time also allows you to catch any dubbing mistakes that might occur, so there's better QC. I would say I only do real-time because that's the kind of deck I have, but handling each tape personally feels better to me, but I certainly see the appeal of a duplicator just due to the huge amount of time it takes to real-time dub everything.

[theinquisitor]

Thanks for the advice. I would consider dubbing the tapes individually but time constraints limit me. I'm starting up a small label so being able to quickly dub tapes would be ideal. So long as mono recording won't be too much of a problem and the high speed dub won't result in too noticeable a loss of quality it seems worth it.

[stormcrow]

I'm thinking about making a strictly limited run of "Ruins" home made tapes. Bulk cassettes with ordinary home-printed jcards (2 panels), just like once was every demotape. The result could be similar to this, what do you think about?

[thekeeper]

stormcrow, looks good. I like the faded black of the j-card.

[kktz]

Yes, looks great, just like in the glorious xerox tape trading days.