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Looper's Delight
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At 3:32 PM -0500 2/9/01, Pete Mundt wrote:
>I've got a good friend who described how he did this with 2 reel to
>reel machines by placing them both on a level surface side by side.
>Then he would place coke bottles between the 2 machines, and thread
>the tape through the first machine, then in a zig-zag patern through
>the coke bottles and on through the second machine. Depending on how
>long of a loop he wanted, determined how many bottles he would use,
>and how far apart the machines would be.
Mic stands also work well as tape guides, though coke bottles are
obviously cheaper!
This dual-deck delay technique has a history dating back to the
1950s, and it was a favorite practice of Pauline Oliveros during her
San Francisco Tape Center days in the '60s (she uses four PCM-42s
now).
In my Santa Cruz days we used to use a pair of 4-track decks, with
each track routed to a separate speaker in a quad setup. I did one
piece that used a particularly interesting hack involving
re-threading of the tape part-way through the performance. Normally
the tape runs between the capstan and pinch roller in such a way that
the tape is drawn across the heads from left to right. If you
re-thread the tape so that it runs around the other side of the
capstan before it passes between capstan and pinch roller, the tape
will then play backwards. Normal playback tension on the supply and
takeup reels should keep the tape from fouling.
It takes just a few seconds to do this, and the result is that
whatever is on the tape will now play backwards. In my piece, which
was about 30 minutes long, the dual-deck delay system functioned as a
long quadraphonic delay for the first 2/3 of the piece. Then there
was a brief pause while the tape was rethreaded, and the same time
the tape speed was switched from 7.5 to 15 ips. For the final 10
minutes of the piece the tape played back in reverse at double speed.
--
______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD zvonar@zvonar.com
(818) 788-2202 voice zvonar@LCSaudio.com
(818) 788-2203 fax zvonar@well.com
http://www.zvonar.com