Tapes Tapes Tapes!

Hmmm... it hadn't even occurred to me that you folks were scattered all over the country. Here I am in good ol' Tempe with my stash of tapes and such, thinking that all these other KCAC/KDKB folks must still be locals too... Anyway, I have a couple of cassette decks, a reel-to-reel tape deck, a turntable, and a stand-alone digital audio burner so I pretty much have what I need to put old analog stuff onto CD. On the other hand, if someone locally has professional equipment and abilities, we can probably make it sound even better. Bob Gately, Ronco, Johnny D - your move! Contact me anytime at tomwright666@yahoo.com. As for posting stuff online so everyone can just access it without me having to make physical copies: sounds good, but someone would have to do that work for me. I still use the computer pretty much as a glorified typewriter and have few skills beyond basic word processing. Did I say few? Make that none.

FYI, I digitized the two Hans Olson tapes over the weekend... one turned out very well, and the other one - from a fragile, damaged tape - not so well but nevertheless complete and listenable. Anybody remember a song of his called "I'm Doing the Best I Can Do"? He damn near blew the roof off the studio with that one; an incredibly intense blues performance.

Don't expect sonic miracles from these tapes; I was a young punk with no money, so I had a cheap-ass Panasonic reel-to-reel tape recorder from J.C. Penney's, and I bought the lowest-grade tape I could find at Radio Shack. I also had a little crackerbox cassette recorder that I sometimes used instead of the Panasonic, because those Certron cassettes at the drugstore were even cheaper than the cheapest reel-to-reel tapes. Around 1978 the Panasonic suffered a merciful death and I switched to a relatively high-quality cassette deck... alas, I used Memorex cassettes for a couple of years, which sounded good at the time but have now shriveled with age and are prone to self-destruction if I dare to try to play them. By 1980 I switched to TDK cassettes which still survive in pristine shape, but by then there was little on the radio worth recording. So you've been warned: expect muddy sound, lots of hiss, occasional tape damage, and in general a pretty primitive sound. But at least I was smart enough to make direct recordings, through a headphone jack or other audio output device; these are not tinny "microphone-stuck-up-to-the-speaker" recordings. I think you'll enjoy them, once we get something set up to distribute them.

Tom