Old Cassette Recordings, Bad Playing, and Editing – Thoughts from November 9, 2025

The main thing going on in my life right now is music. I should mention that Patti, the cats, and a few other people are always in my focus, but when I’m alone, music is my focus. I’ve spent more time working on music than writing. What you’re reading is my attempt to not completely ignore my writing duties. The song I’ve been working on is still called “life-hor,” which stands for Life Is Horrible. I’m only working on the music for the song right now. Eventually, I will change the lyrics to something less depressing. The song is on version 8. Whenever I make a major change to a song, I change the version number. I played Patti a version with a violin instead of a voice. She seemed to really like it.

I recently pulled out folders with logs of songs I recorded on 4-track cassette tapes and an ADAT machine. If you’re old like me, you may know what cassette tapes are, but most people don’t know what an ADAT machine is. It’s basically an 8-track recorder of digital audio on high quality VHS tapes. If I lost you at cassette tapes, I’m sure I lost you even more. These are recordings from around the 90s. Many songs came out of this time and some of the audio features people I haven’t seen since the 90s. I started recording the cassette tapes into the computer. It’s a time-consuming process I must monitor while it’s recording. There’s about an hour on each tape and there are 19 of them. Who needs spare time?

The ADAT recordings are going to take even more work. I bought a computer interface to record the 8 audio tracks. I’m supposed to get it in the next few days. The hardest part of connecting all of it is the lack of space in my office. It’s just another puzzle I need to solve. That’s the story of my life. I want to do something, and I get the tools I need to accomplish it. Things may not work the way I want them to, but I learn something new every time. Tools always have more than one way to use them. The one thing I know is that connecting things together is the simple part. Getting the computer to accept the audio and dealing with tapes that I haven’t played since the 90s is another matter.

Hearing these old songs and other audio from the 90s reminds me how much has changed since that time. I’m older, deafer, and more forgetful. Many of these recordings hold no place in my memory banks. This is mainly because they are forgettable moments. My playing is repetitive and objectively bad. The same song fragments keep coming up repeatedly. Most of the time I wonder why I recorded what I’m playing. The answer is usually because I was experimenting with sounds and notes. I spent many hours playing without recording, but if I thought of something new, I wanted to record it in case it was good. Because tape is linier, the good gets recorded with the bad.

Listening to these recordings is a mix of delight and irritation. It reminds me of why I was so excited when you could realistically record audio tracks on the computer. The tapes were limited to 4 and 8 tracks. Now, the only limit is how much time you have to record multiple tracks. Even that is simplified with copy and paste. You can hit wrong notes or sing out of time. It can all be fixed after you play. You can combine multiple recordings of the same lines into one flawless take. Only through the computer could I truly compose the songs into what I could hear in my head. These live recordings make me appreciate editing and remind me why I don’t enjoy live music.