I’ve been digitizing very old cassettes again. The glockenspiel and guitar for this come from the original 4-track cassette recordings for The Land’s debut back in 2005. The tracks were recorded on a TASCAM rackmount 4-track recorder – which records at almost double the normal speed. But I don’t have that machine anymore so I am digitizing them at almost half the original speed with a regular (dying) cassette deck – which gives the guitar and chimes some nice rich depth. The viola comes from some recent improvisations by Judith while setting up a delay pedal/amp combination, recorded onto an old tape at normal speed.
The collage is created in Reaper using the Shortcircuit plugin. This plugin lets you slice up an audio file into a “key map” so that each note is assigned to a different spot in the file. I created separate tracks for each of the audio files, assigned them the same key map, and then dropped in and looped some old midi files from other recordings I’ve done. I added a photo to show the map and setup.
There are some delay, reverb, and loopers layering the original base sounds over time for a gradual accumulation of mush.
