Tape Loops & Treatments

TAPE LOOPS & TREATMENT
// There is a lot to say about open reel tape decks, the tape itself, and all the creative ways to use them. Opinions galore about what a good one is, why they’re dumb, how much easier digital things are, noise, hiss, cost, and way more. I love reel to reel tape decks, they are amazing, and I don’t care.

Yesterday my very own WD41 tape idler arrived from the UK and so this morning I wanted to share a couple of ways to use an open reel deck creatively.

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LOOPS
Fig.1 presents a simple 4 notes played from the Roland SH-101 directly into my Revox PR99. The tape is cut and spliced into a loop. The loop is fed around the tape idler, over the heads of the deck, and around the take up reel.

Ideally I would use a longer loop (sometimes much much longer) but I wanted you to be able to see both sides and get a picture of the whole thing. Why the tape idler is important to me is that it provides the tension for the looped tape. I don’t currently have a mic stand with a tiny mount on it, so I used it in a little vice, and that worked fine.

We start at 15ips, switch to 7.5ips (hear it slow down) and then using the DEVIATION knob on the B77 varispeed control I can slow the loop down even more.

Then I introduce delay as an effect (or treatment) of the tape deck’s output.

You can see why this is lovely and captivating. 4 dumb notes have become a whole thing that will go on forever.

Fig.2 is a basic diagram of what’s happening here.

Brian Eno used this technique to record Ambient 1 – Music for Airports with the intention of having as little involvement with the recorded notes as possible. So the project used multiple loops at different lengths, and their cycles were, well, ambient.

One might ask: why don’t you just sample it and use a computer? I could. People do. But for me, artistically, there is something special about tape, razor blades, touching things, and playing in the physical world that feels wonderful. There is far more time for thinking and feeling and a different kind of openness to accidents that just delight me.

I’ve loaned my other tape decks out to Ralph and Colten to assit in inspiring them.
Might be time to find a couple more!