When I was in fourth grade, I discovered my moms old, portable cassette player. It was a cheap one, with a small microphone. I would spend hours, just making stuff up, using only the sound of my own voice, and play it back. It was portable, so I could also carry it around with me, and record other sounds. Like a toilet flushing. For a fourth grader is funny. I stopped for a while, because I lost interest, until I got to High School, and my senior year, took an electronic music class. Our first project was, we had to record 5 sounds, at 10 seconds in length. So I recorded the sound of a toilet flush , the sound of a 71 dodge starting up, and the sound of a dehumidifier, turning on. I forget the other sounds. Then when I got to school, we had to transfer the sounds, from cassette, to a reel to reel tape. Then we learned how to splice tape, and to make a tape loop. I had stopped doing my own sound recordings, until college, and a friend, introduced me to Monty Python, and I started to make my own Monty Python Mixed tapes. After graduating from college, and working, for a living. I bought an Ensoniq Mirage DSK digital sampler, and started doing my own sampling. That was really cool, and fun. It’s amazing how certain sounds change when put into a sampler, while others stay the same, sound wise. Example: A Casio PT keyboard will sound a little different, where as a sound from a cassette tape will stay the same. Of course, I lost interest again, and sold the Mirage. I tend to loose interest quickly, and never stick with one thing for very long. Still have a bad habit of doing noting, or watching TV. About six, to seven years ago I bought two home stereo Cassette decks. A TEAC and a Pioneer one, which needs some new belts. The TEAC works well, and I still play tapes, but not very often.

I still think about getting back into making my own recordings, and sound collages, but I never do. It’s either, I’ll loose interest again, or money. I just need to work on training my mind to break my bad habits.

good post Paul.

I used to mess with tapes too when I was a kid. Pretty much like yourself I started by recording my own voice and messing with that. Playing with playback speed to make my voice sound weird and flipping over the tape for some of the more interesting results. Even used to do stuff like call up my friends and play them the warped versions of my voice over the phone. Freaked their parents out too. that was fun man.

Later on I got my first fourtrack recorder and I kind of used to bounce stuff between that and my old tape deck. Recorded just about anything. Never quite got to mess with tapeloops though.

by the time I got into mixing and recording professionally tapes were slowly getting replaced with DATs so only a few of my old recordings actually got mixed down to tape. Most of it was recorded to DAT. ...And then CD burners came along and DAWs got a lot cheaper so things changed again.

cheers,

[This message has been edited by 3351 (edited 03-02-2008).]