vainandy said:

I had an old tabletop stereo that I gave to my mother's boyfriend when I bought a component set and I had the 8 track in the drawer up underneath the stereo and it had just sat in there for years without being played.

My mom and grandmother had those long floor model stereos, with the storage space for records in the middle.

[Edited 7/20/12 13:58pm]

I use to bump that cheapo stereo something fierce. Believe it or not, them 8 tracks sounded pretty good on it. I know the picture is hella blurry but can anybody guess what the record is in the middle. The picture on the cover of the record in the middle is of two women. The records on the far ends are the Sugarhill Gang and The Sequence.

Note the records nailed on the wall in the back of me.

[Edited 7/20/12 23:08pm]

Great thread!

I was just telling someone (younger than me) who is exploring cassettes for the first

time for recording, about how back in the day I would never buy an album on pre-recorded

cassette.

Those sounded awful!

They also didn't last long and the cover art got shrunken down to a card size

(or later in to a million pannel fold out thing).

The best thing to do was get the record (& later the CD) and record that on to

Maxell high bias chrome tapes!

The sound quality that way was SO MUCH better than the store bought cassette album.

And with 90 minutes per tape you could fit the album as well as 12" versions & b-sides!

I also like the talk here about the reel to reels. My dad was a radio DJ when we were kids

in the 70's and he had an awesome Teac reel to reel in his music room. He made reel

after reel compilations that he would be running through the big speakers he'd wired

in to the living room. Hours and hours of music he'd recorded from records on to

catagoried reel to reel tapes. He ended up making a couple of shelves worth of reels.

When I go back home to visit these days I bring a small mini disc recorder and run

my Dad's old reels on that same 1970's Teac machine in to digital storage on MiniDiscs

(and later transfered to computer HD, edited and made in to files for the ol' iPod).

The tapes STILL SOUND GREAT! He has everything labeled including recording dates

with the first ones in the mid 70's and barring occasional typical tape flutters, sound

clear and rich! Real full bodied warm tape quality. I love running those reels. Very cool.

JoeyC said:

I use to bump that cheapo stereo something fierce. Believe it or not, them 8 tracks sounded pretty good on it. I know the picture is hella blurry but can anybody guess what the record is in the middle. The picture on the cover of the record in the middle is of two women. The records on the far ends are the Sugarhill Gang and The Sequence.

Note the records nailed on the wall in the back of me.

From what I remember, that's a custom sleeve for labels which are either distributed, manufactured or marketed by Mercury Records. Think I have a Gap Band single with that sleeve. And I guess that's the O'Jays' "Backstabbers" album under the stereo and cassettes/8-tracks?

vainandy said:

I always wanted one of these. My mother's best friend used to have one with the disco ball and mirrors and her's had flashing disco lights over the speakers. Hell, I still want one.

Me too

Awesome gear

chewymusic said:

Great thread!

I was just telling someone (younger than me) who is exploring cassettes for the first

time for recording, about how back in the day I would never buy an album on pre-recorded

cassette.

Those sounded awful!

It depended on the record company, CBS cassettes didn't sound that great, but ones from A&M and Warner/Elektra sounded pretty good. Pre-recorded cassettes from the 1960's and 1970's didn't have good sound quality and had a lot of hiss.

I remember back in the mid-70's I came up with the idea of mixing two songs together. I had a Radio Shack mixer and it was so freaking awesome. I could record two songs at once! I could fade a song out and bring another one in! Man, that was so cool.

So I'd take songs - rock, mostly - that had weird breaks and combine another song into it during the middle eight (look it up if you don't know what a "middle eight" is), and let it take over. Then when it was over, I'd bring the second song back at where I'd interrupted it. This was huge.

I remember after seeing Prince on the "Purple Rain" tour how he'd combined "Let's Go Crazy" and "Delirious" like that. I recreated that on tape with my 12- inch records of those songs, and EVERYONE screamed for them.

I had a GREAT Sharp cassette deck that had switches, not buttons, to control the player. I could stop and start the tape on a dime, so you could not ever notice the transition from one song to another. I never had a reel-to-reel tape deck (couldn't afford one), but because of those switches, I could run my Sharp cassette deck as precisely as a ree-to-reel tape deck so it was OK.

I got amazingly good at stopping a song at exactly the right place and starting the next one perfectly, so that the beat never stopped. We were creating our version of hip-hop, I guess. I remember reading an article about hip-hop, and how hip-hop songs kept the same beat for 30 minutes or even an hour, so that was going to take over all the dance clubs. I thought, "We've been doing THAT since the 70's!"

My tapes went all over the country, and even down to Mexico, and were really big on the streets of New York. We had some basketball players from NYC at my college, and they loved my stuff. They'd always go back to NYC with lots of copies of my cassettes for their friends. I did all kinds of music, but I liked funk best so those guys really dug my stuff.

I just wasn't smart enough to market myself as a "DJ". To me, what we were doing was a lot of fun, but it wasn't rocket science. Absolutely none of us at the time thought of ourselves as musicians, or even anywhere near being a musician. We just played records and made tapes and tried to keep a beat going and mixed stuff together than no one else had. It wasn't very hard to do, and we didn't think we were special. And we SURE didn't come up with ridiculous names for ourselves.

I guess we should have!

Shango said:

JoeyC said:

I use to bump that cheapo stereo something fierce. Believe it or not, them 8 tracks sounded pretty good on it. I know the picture is hella blurry but can anybody guess what the record is in the middle. The picture on the cover of the record in the middle is of two women. The records on the far ends are the Sugarhill Gang and The Sequence.

Note the records nailed on the wall in the back of me.

From what I remember, that's a custom sleeve for labels which are either distributed, manufactured or marketed by Mercury Records. Think I have a Gap Band single with that sleeve. And I guess that's the O'Jays' "Backstabbers" album under the stereo and cassettes/8-tracks?

That record was the only one that i ever brought from a Mercury Records artist. I kinda figured it was a generic cover but i wasn't sure... The record was Rappin Blow by Kurtis Blow.

As far as the the Record that's below the Record/8 track player. I think it is Backstabbers. For a minute i thought it was a Spinners record but i don't remember a spinners record with that cover.

The cool thing about that 8 track player was that it had a record button for 8 track. I thought i was hot stuff because i had a stereo that recorded on 8 tracks.

On a different note. I was thinking about some of the portable boom boxes that i've had over the years. These hitachi's were pretty good.

[Edited 7/21/12 13:53pm]

MickyDolenz said:

vainandy said:

I had an old tabletop stereo that I gave to my mother's boyfriend when I bought a component set and I had the 8 track in the drawer up underneath the stereo and it had just sat in there for years without being played.

My mom and grandmother had those long floor model stereos, with the storage space for records in the middle.

[Edited 7/20/12 13:58pm]

My mother had a console stereo also. Her's was made by Soundesign. With the lid down, it looked just like a piece of furniture rather than a stereo.

chewymusic said:

Great thread!

I was just telling someone (younger than me) who is exploring cassettes for the first

time for recording, about how back in the day I would never buy an album on pre-recorded

cassette.

Those sounded awful!

They also didn't last long and the cover art got shrunken down to a card size

(or later in to a million pannel fold out thing).

The best thing to do was get the record (& later the CD) and record that on to

Maxell high bias chrome tapes!

The sound quality that way was SO MUCH better than the store bought cassette album.

And with 90 minutes per tape you could fit the album as well as 12" versions & b-sides!

I also like the talk here about the reel to reels. My dad was a radio DJ when we were kids

in the 70's and he had an awesome Teac reel to reel in his music room. He made reel

after reel compilations that he would be running through the big speakers he'd wired

in to the living room. Hours and hours of music he'd recorded from records on to

catagoried reel to reel tapes. He ended up making a couple of shelves worth of reels.

When I go back home to visit these days I bring a small mini disc recorder and run

my Dad's old reels on that same 1970's Teac machine in to digital storage on MiniDiscs

(and later transfered to computer HD, edited and made in to files for the ol' iPod).

The tapes STILL SOUND GREAT! He has everything labeled including recording dates

with the first ones in the mid 70's and barring occasional typical tape flutters, sound

clear and rich! Real full bodied warm tape quality. I love running those reels. Very cool.

I feel exactly the same way about the cassettes. It was much better to buy the record and make your own cassette and the homemade cassette sounded better than the pre-recorded ones. Also, with a 90 minute cassette, you could put one whole album on one side of the tape and another whole album on the other side. Everyone raved about Dolby but I personally didn't see what was so great about it. With Dolby on, the tape sounded more muffled than with it turned off. You're right about the high bias tapes too. My favorite was TDK though and my second choice was Maxell.

RodeoSchro said:

I remember back in the mid-70's I came up with the idea of mixing two songs together. I had a Radio Shack mixer and it was so freaking awesome. I could record two songs at once! I could fade a song out and bring another one in! Man, that was so cool.

So I'd take songs - rock, mostly - that had weird breaks and combine another song into it during the middle eight (look it up if you don't know what a "middle eight" is), and let it take over. Then when it was over, I'd bring the second song back at where I'd interrupted it. This was huge.

I remember after seeing Prince on the "Purple Rain" tour how he'd combined "Let's Go Crazy" and "Delirious" like that. I recreated that on tape with my 12- inch records of those songs, and EVERYONE screamed for them.

I had a GREAT Sharp cassette deck that had switches, not buttons, to control the player. I could stop and start the tape on a dime, so you could not ever notice the transition from one song to another. I never had a reel-to-reel tape deck (couldn't afford one), but because of those switches, I could run my Sharp cassette deck as precisely as a ree-to-reel tape deck so it was OK.

I got amazingly good at stopping a song at exactly the right place and starting the next one perfectly, so that the beat never stopped. We were creating our version of hip-hop, I guess. I remember reading an article about hip-hop, and how hip-hop songs kept the same beat for 30 minutes or even an hour, so that was going to take over all the dance clubs. I thought, "We've been doing THAT since the 70's!"

My tapes went all over the country, and even down to Mexico, and were really big on the streets of New York. We had some basketball players from NYC at my college, and they loved my stuff. They'd always go back to NYC with lots of copies of my cassettes for their friends. I did all kinds of music, but I liked funk best so those guys really dug my stuff.

I just wasn't smart enough to market myself as a "DJ". To me, what we were doing was a lot of fun, but it wasn't rocket science. Absolutely none of us at the time thought of ourselves as musicians, or even anywhere near being a musician. We just played records and made tapes and tried to keep a beat going and mixed stuff together than no one else had. It wasn't very hard to do, and we didn't think we were special. And we SURE didn't come up with ridiculous names for ourselves.

I guess we should have!

Oh my God, what you have just described is exactly how I have lived my entire life! I did exactly the same thing!

I discovered it during the disco era when I'd go to the skating rinks and I'd hear one song playing and when it would reach the breakdown of the song, the DJ would bring in another song and overlap the two songs playing at the same time for as long as he could before either the breakdown would end or before the two beats would get away with him because a lot of those songs had live drummers rather than drum machines so it was very easy for the beats on the two songs to start going in different directions. We just simply called it "mixing".

When I heard this, it was like orgasm to my ears and I was fascinated with it ever since. I couldn't afford a component system, mixer, and two turntables so I had to do the best with what I had and came up with the EXACT same thing that you did. Making cassette tapes and manipulating the pause button on the cassette player. I eventually was able to get it to perfection where the beat of the second song would continue where the beat of the first song left off in a continuous flow. Sometimes I would even make my own extended remix of a song or my own edited version of a song. And when you mentioned the Sharp brand cassette player/recorder, that really hit home with me because I've had my best luck with that brand when it comes to using the pause button. The way the edits would turn out using the pause button on other brands just weren't as good as the ones made with the Sharp brand. Then, as the years went by and I got older and started making my own money, I eventually graduated to the two turntables but I do miss editing the songs with a cassette button pause button. The best is to have a combination of both. Two turntables and also a cassette recorder so you can edit our your mistakes.

I also did the same thing with making cassettes for friends. I didn't travel or anything, but anytime someone was having a party, it was always me they called for a tape. Then, they would end up making a copy for a friend and that friend would make another copy for another friend. I was really tripped out one time when I went to a party at someone's house that I had recently met, but instantly heard and recognized one of my tapes playing that I had made a long time ago before I even knew them.

You're also right about not being a musician. What we're doing is an art and a craft but it's not a skill of a musician, it's a skill of a DJ and the craft should not be used to create new songs but rather to create new mixes. We depend on musicians to give us new material for our craft and when the term musician becomes the norm for simply doing what a DJ does, there's no new music for the DJs to mix and it just becomes recycling the same old stuff over and over. Actually, it becomes mixing someone else's MIX into your own mix rather than mixing someone else's SONG into your own mix. I think that's why I'm much more harder and rigid on shit hop than a lot of other people because like they say, "Don't criticise something if you can't do it yourself", well I've done it myself. Maybe not on a professional level with the various computers and things but from a "use what you have available to you and get the most you can get out of it" kind of way in my spare time for fun. Just give me some new music to mix. I don't need a "musician" to mix it for me because I can make my own creations with some music. But I don't want to be making no mix of someone else's mix which is basically what an R&B song is these days. It's a mix rather than a song. Plus, my own mixes wouldn't have the rediculous thugged out "talking" all over it to ruin it.

vainandy said:

MickyDolenz said:

My mom and grandmother had those long floor model stereos, with the storage space for records in the middle.

[Edited 7/20/12 13:58pm]

My mother had a console stereo also. Her's was made by Soundesign. With the lid down, it looked just like a piece of furniture rather than a stereo.

We had one of those when I was growing up. I swear, that damn thing felt like it weighed a thousand pounds! I don't even know how they got it into the house!

JoeyC said:

That record was the only one that i ever brought from a Mercury Records artist. I kinda figured it was a generic cover but i wasn't sure... The record was Rappin Blow by Kurtis Blow.

It originally was called Christmas Rappin' and had this cover:

MickyDolenz said:

JoeyC said:

That record was the only one that i ever brought from a Mercury Records artist. I kinda figured it was a generic cover but i wasn't sure... The record was Rappin Blow by Kurtis Blow.

It originally was called Christmas Rappin' and had this cover:

Oh yeah, i remember Christmas Rappin. That was the first Kurtis Blow record i ever brought. I should have worded the above statement in a different way. I meant to say that Kurtis Blow was the only Mercury Records artist that i ever brought records of. I actually brought Christmas Rappin, Rappin Blow, and The Breaks on record. By the time The Breaks came out, i was more into cassettes. There was this record store on the West Side of Fresno California called J&C's House of Records. Back in the early 1980's J&C's was the place to go to get the latest Soul,Rap and Funk records. Actually it was one of the oldest independent record Stores in California. I think it opened up in the mid 1970's and finally closed it's doors in 2009. Sad.

[Edited 7/22/12 19:34pm]

G3000 said:

Back in the day, Stereo Equipment was just a big a status symbol as a new car. You would rearrange your living room to accomidate your equipment, more so to show it off, and that DID NOT include your TV!

Excellent photos, you have got the whole history of musical formats there, everything from 90s back to what look like phonographs and even wax cylinder players.

We had a guy at my tamp club who bought in some old gramophones and wax cylinder players. He demonstrated them and it was one of the most interesting things I have seen in my life.

vainandy said:

vainandy said:

Oh my God, what you have just described is exactly how I have lived my entire life! I did exactly the same thing!

I discovered it during the disco era when I'd go to the skating rinks and I'd hear one song playing and when it would reach the breakdown of the song, the DJ would bring in another song and overlap the two songs playing at the same time for as long as he could before either the breakdown would end or before the two beats would get away with him because a lot of those songs had live drummers rather than drum machines so it was very easy for the beats on the two songs to start going in different directions. We just simply called it "mixing".

When I heard this, it was like orgasm to my ears and I was fascinated with it ever since. I couldn't afford a component system, mixer, and two turntables so I had to do the best with what I had and came up with the EXACT same thing that you did. Making cassette tapes and manipulating the pause button on the cassette player. I eventually was able to get it to perfection where the beat of the second song would continue where the beat of the first song left off in a continuous flow. Sometimes I would even make my own extended remix of a song or my own edited version of a song. And when you mentioned the Sharp brand cassette player/recorder, that really hit home with me because I've had my best luck with that brand when it comes to using the pause button. The way the edits would turn out using the pause button on other brands just weren't as good as the ones made with the Sharp brand. Then, as the years went by and I got older and started making my own money, I eventually graduated to the two turntables but I do miss editing the songs with a cassette button pause button. The best is to have a combination of both. Two turntables and also a cassette recorder so you can edit our your mistakes.

I also did the same thing with making cassettes for friends. I didn't travel or anything, but anytime someone was having a party, it was always me they called for a tape. Then, they would end up making a copy for a friend and that friend would make another copy for another friend. I was really tripped out one time when I went to a party at someone's house that I had recently met, but instantly heard and recognized one of my tapes playing that I had made a long time ago before I even knew them.

You're also right about not being a musician. What we're doing is an art and a craft but it's not a skill of a musician, it's a skill of a DJ and the craft should not be used to create new songs but rather to create new mixes. We depend on musicians to give us new material for our craft and when the term musician becomes the norm for simply doing what a DJ does, there's no new music for the DJs to mix and it just becomes recycling the same old stuff over and over. Actually, it becomes mixing someone else's MIX into your own mix rather than mixing someone else's SONG into your own mix. I think that's why I'm much more harder and rigid on shit hop than a lot of other people because like they say, "Don't criticise something if you can't do it yourself", well I've done it myself. Maybe not on a professional level with the various computers and things but from a "use what you have available to you and get the most you can get out of it" kind of way in my spare time for fun. Just give me some new music to mix. I don't need a "musician" to mix it for me because I can make my own creations with some music. But I don't want to be making no mix of someone else's mix which is basically what an R&B song is these days. It's a mix rather than a song. Plus, my own mixes wouldn't have the rediculous thugged out "talking" all over it to ruin it.

Awesome post, Andy! We were just grooving, weren't we? Too bad we weren't smart enough to call ourselves "DJ FizzAPop" or something like that!

We'd be billionaires today!

Sadly, I sold my Sharp cassette deck in the early '90's and I've regretted that ever since.

JoeyC said:

I meant to say that Kurtis Blow was the only Mercury Records artist that i ever brought records of.

No Gap Band?

MickyDolenz said:

JoeyC said:

I meant to say that Kurtis Blow was the only Mercury Records artist that i ever brought records of.

No Gap Band?

I brought Gap Band's stuff on cassette.

Sometimes my sentences come out disjointed....My bad.

OMG, here's the cassette deck I had! Man, does it look GOOD!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/S...4899wt_904

This thing was THE BOMB.

JoeyC said:

MickyDolenz said:

No Gap Band?

I brought Gap Band's stuff on cassette.

Sometimes my sentences come out disjointed....My bad.

Only Gap Band I, II, & III were actually on Mercury. The rest, up to Straight From The Heart were on Total Experience, although Total Experience was distributed by Mercury.

POOK said:

vainandy said:

Also with cassettes, you could record records onto tape in a continuous flow using the pause button. I found that after you recorded one song, rewind the tape just a little bit and start recording the next song over the outro of the previous song. Certain tape brands did better than others. With TDK, you could hear just a hair of the previous song playing for a split second after the next song started and then it would fade down similar to the way they played them on the radio with two turntables. With Maxell though, there was no slight overlap and I didn't like that.

CAUSE POOK GETS ILL WHEN POOK ON DA PAUSE BUTTON THEN POOK GETS FILL AND ORG CANT SAY NUTTIN!

POOK?!???!!!!!! wow it's POOK!!

POOK POOK it's really you!

Genesia said:

I used to work in radio, so I have experience with all the analog formats. I wasn't editing music, though. Since I worked in news, it was all pretty much spoken word - unless I was doing a special "package" that needed intro or bumper music.

Also reminds me of when I used to lay out a tabloid newspaper - getting halftones shot, having my copy typeset, using an Exacto knife and waxer to lay it all out.

Those were the days.

Genesia...

I was a journalism major when I went to "real" college.

got lost in the shuffle of campus life and got put on "probation".

I never went back.

Instead I went into medical field. But I ALWAYS look at journalists with envy.

Anybody remember car & boom box record players?

MickyDolenz said:

Anybody remember car & boom box record players?

No Way !

The car record players were before my time but the boom box ones, I don't ever remember hearing about them. How did they sound??

JoeyC said:

No Way !

The car record players were before my time but the boom box ones, I don't ever remember hearing about them. How did they sound??

My cousin had a Panasonic boom box (don't remember the model) where the turntable came out of the bottom. I think it used 8 or 10 D batteries. The one he had sounded alright, but it had to be sitting on a flat surface to play records. You can walk with a cassette playing. Also carrying records around seemed impractical and having them out in the sun is not a good idea. I guess they were used for like going on a picnic at the park or something.

I splice tapes every day and I'm glad I do. Tapes are my day job, an audio archivist.

MickyDolenz said:

Anybody remember car & boom box record players?

Love those, but wouldn't it be dangerous to change a single and drive at the same time. That thing must have caused a few fender benders.

I also saw a 1960s thing that looked like a radio, with a carry strap, which actually played 7 inch singles and had a pouch you could carry along with you, It was designed for the beach and sock hops according to the man who spoke to us at our club. It played an old copy of Down town by Petula Clark very well.

Adorecream said:

Love those, but wouldn't it be dangerous to change a single and drive at the same time. That thing must have caused a few fender benders.

It can't be much different than people eating or putting on makeup while driving.

Explore 60's 70's 80's and 90's Radio Shack Catalogs from cover to cover!!

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/