Dont think theres been a topic on this yet.
Ive recorded an ep and was planning on doing a small run of casettes just to hand out. Does anyone have any experience with this?
Ive done a little research and it appears you can just plug directly from pc into some tape recorders and hit play, record simultaneously. Is there an easier, quicker way of doing this. Or does anyone have any equipment recommendations.
Also a rough cost of equipment incl tapes.
For printing jcards is this something can be done on a printer at home. Or would it be better paying a stationary company.
Absolute first timer here so excuses the ignorance.
Feel free to turn this into a general DIY release thread if anyone has any experience
Will happily chip in more here when I am not in work but just a quick one on it - it is painful to do it yourself but can be done for small numbers. Plan it out.
We did our own tapes for Ordinator and capped it to 20. To do it some way right you will need a tape deck to record to, and ideally a mixer of some sort, depending how technical you want to get with it. I am assuming you have an interface already if you have recorded yourself.
Stereo line out of the interface, into the mixer, send your mix off your DAW, don't get the levels too hot, line out of the mixer into the tape deck, record a sample taken of a fairly good reference of your mix. Listen back to it on the tape, on headphones, speakers, etc. Compare it to another tape you already know.
You are likely going to record it too hot the first time around but make notes, adjust, go again. This is what I like using a physical mixer for - it is easier make a tape mix adjustment here on the fly than do it in the DAW. Paper notes, masking tape on the mixer, etc. spend an evening tweaking until you are happy.
You are going to have to listen to your songs every time. If you trust your setup to run without being watched it isn't so bad, but I couldn't, so I sat out every tape. 15 mins a side, 20 tapes - 10 hours. Consider that before doing it. It took four evenings for me.
For printing - we did it ourselves and the quality is fine for what it was supposed to be (photocopied and ragged) but there is a fade on the paper over time and I wish I had got them done in a printers. You can get tape templates online for j-card, use that in GIMP to make your mockups, test your printer out for lining up double sided and write down how you do it so you don't make twenty fucking mistakes like I did.
You will find lads selling tapes all over the place, but I got mine from here: https://tapemuzik.de/en/
They do a ton of options but I just got blank tapes with 15 mins a side. You can get them to look after the whole thing for you. I have no idea how much that costs but it is definitely easier.
It is time consuming and very trial and error, but is worth it to see if you can get a method, process, and mix that works and can be used again.
I did not do the Nílim tapes myself :laugh:
Love doing stuff DIY and try to keep everything as much as is feasible and not awkward as close to each band I am in. Self recording, mixing, mastering mostly. All artwork myself.
Brilliant, thanks for that couldnt have asked for a better reply.
Other guitarist is going on a eu tour so plan was to do 50 that he could hand out at shows. But sounds like it could an undertaking to do that many.
I work from home so have time, and obviously keeping costs down is a priority so I still would like to give it a go however.
The aforementioned guitarist is the sound geek, so hopefully the technical stuff will mean more to him. But i assume any tape deck with recording features would do? Or dyou have any recommendations for it and a mixer you used?
Cover will just be B&W drawing and logo, old school demo style, so the self printing might do. Cant imagine the tapes will be collectors items on discogs either so longevitys probably not an issue!
But i agree i like the diy approach to the whole process. Especially as we have already done everything ourselves up to now, would be a shame to outsource the final steps. That and we're cheap bastards playing shitty punk ofc.
Home recorder here too and about to re-enter the world of tapes after a break of 36 years :laugh: I'm an old cunt and grew up with them, so there's no mysticism or romanticism for me with them. I was happy enough just releasing stuff digitally, it's all about the music after all, but I had an idea which entertains me so I'll do it for the craic. One good thing about tapes and records, once the CD era kicked in, was we learned that people with enough talent to entertain for longer than 45 minutes are few and far between. I've kept the Homeball albums 45 minutes or less, the whole idea being it should be able to fit on one side of a C90. What I'm going to do is have two albums per tape, one each side. I am under no illusions about how limited the appeal of this is, so I want to do it pissing away as little money as possible on a vanity project :laugh:
I think what Ochoill has said is spot on, first and foremost, but I'll go into how I'm going about it, too.
I do everything myself: playing, mixing, mastering, etc. and I see no reason not to have a craic at doing tapes, rather than getting it done professionally. The real power of tapes was that you could produce them yourself, I used to love doing it back in the day, so no need to fuck with that. For the DIY approach, I think a tape deck with an input gain stage (aka rec level) is essential, preferably with visual input monitoring, so you can control the audio volume being written to the cassette and that will save you hours of ballache. Don't use a boombox or the likes. I had an old fucked NAD deck in the attic which I recently repaired, which is what I'm going to use and you can still pick up decent and functional tape decks cheaply enough on Adverts. I think it's worth considering if you're going to do it regularly.
https://www.adverts.ie/for-sale/electronics/home-audio/147/q_cassette/
I use protools as my DAW, I record in 16/44.1, I bounce out to .wav files and I've made a master CD of each album. For me, there's no need to be cleverer than that. I will record from the CD and use the CD output as the audio source going into the tape deck. I will use the input gain of the tape deck to have a healthy, but not overbearing or distorting, signal going to tape, and I will take the output of the tape deck and use that to monitor audio quality - it is affected by any changes I make using the input gain and, as such, can use my ears to judge where the level should be in conjunction with the visual level monitoring on the tape deck. If you send too hot a signal to the tape it can not only sound distorted but can also leave audio artefacts on the other playing side of the tape, just keep that in mind.
As your tape is analogue, it's going to take as long to dub to tape as your music takes to play through, per tape. There used to be places in town who did high-speed dubbing off DAT, but those places are long gone. If you find the prospect of this problematic or depressing, look at using a professional service ;)
From making demos in the 90's, I learned you can fit the back flap, spine, cover and three panels twice on a single A4 page. This is where something physical and tangible really has an edge over digital stuff, so I would say spend a lot of time thinking about making the most of it. I don't have a printer so will get this printed professionally. I have some fairly convoluted ideas for the inlay so it would be shit to not do it right.
It should be an enjoyable and rewarding (not financially) thing to do. Are also you going to release digitally, publish to streaming sites, etc?
Great, more good stuff, sounds like theres a few different approaches to look at. Its a lot more involved than the plug tape deck in a hit record that i assumed. But i suppose thats the fun of it.
I have absolutely no illusions that I'll be making money of these which is why want to do cheap as possible. The intention is to give them away for free at shows, leave in record shops round the city, give to mates who live abroad etc. As would prefer to do that than post a link on an instagram story and hope 4 people click it. I think tapes are a better format than cds for this.
Will obviously be posting it online, sending it round to sites to potentially review etc. also. Just like the idea of having something tangible to go along with it. I know id be more inclined to listen to a free tape than click the 7th new band announced story ive seen today.
My mate is interested in doing a run of tapes in the US down the line but easier and quicker if could get here in the mean time.
So big things coming/watch this space to quote local band parlance.
I've both made my own and got them professionally duplicated. I picked up an old Denon DRM-550 for very cheap and it has a volume meter which made it easy to get levels right. If you have a general understanding of audio you shouldn't have any problems.
Tapes are pretty cheap even in small runs so beyond doing 5-10 DIY it's maybe worth looking at duplication. It's been about 15 years but I used https://tapeline.info which does duplication or you can buy a decent selection of cassettes/colours/labels etc if you're wanting to do it all yourself.
There's also different materials for the actual magnetic tape itself (standard, chrome, metal) which supposedly have an impact on the sound quality but I've never went down that road.