audio tape

In the second Get To Know Your Gear video, the guys from Blorp Corp get to know the Roland RE-201 Space Echo analog delay unit.

This is demo of Motor Keys Tape – a sort of DIY Mellotron.

The Motor Keys can be used to make music with small dc electro motors, controled by a small keyboard.

via ggijs

The Open Reel Ensemble scratches 4 reel-to-reel analog tape recorders to make some really cool music.

Very cool and an interesting reuse of classic technology.

Open Reel Ensemble:

• Ei Wada : Concepter, Circuit, Sound Composition
• Kimitoshi Sato?Programing, Sound Design, Poster Design
• Ren Yamashita?Circuit, Craft
• Sayu Okano?Assistant
• Takuya Asakura?Craft

via Califaudio, where you can find more details and videos on the Open Reel Ensemble.

This video demos the Tapehead Inspector – a sort of tangible sampler. 

Here’s the background on it, via Roy Mohan Shearer:

Inspired by the reversal of the name of a musical trio that I play in with Chris Croasdale and Mr. Jonnie Common. We’re really into tapes, and as Chris’ birthday was coming up Jonnie and I decided to make him a wee instrument: A manual tape player, ie. one in which the player can directly control the movement of the tapehead against the audio tape.

Simply a hack of the increasingly hard-to-source cassette walkman, I took out all the mechanics, hard-wired the tape circuit to ‘on’, lengthened the cable to the tapehead and housed the whole thing in a videotape casing. Jonnie built the instrument case/playing surface and then we made up a few audio tape ’slides’ by recording some of Jonnie’s choice vinyl to tape and getting crafty with scissors and sticky tape! I am abridging greatly for brevity here – I maimed one walkman making the whole thing work and the overall instrument design was chewed over a few times over cups of tea at Jonnie’s house. We’re pretty pleased with the results and hope Chris enjoys inspecting his tapes!

Looks like this would be fairly easy to recreate – and an interesting, tactile way to manipulate sound.