Max The Tape Recorder's Fourth Album
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All tracks composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Max. Cover art also by Max from a drawing made at 13yo.
You can listen to the album on Bandcamp.
Comments on some of the tracks:
Track 1 - "Cé l'printemps!!!!"
I used Pringles chips cans as percussions for this piece;
This is also an experiment where I took the tape of an old computer data backup cartridge from the early '90s and recorded on it using the Fostex E-8 analog 8-track recorder;
The tape is 1/4" and 1020' long, very very thin but quite resistant, giving loads of high frequencies.
Just to give you an idea of how thin this tape is, a 7" reel holds up 1200' of 1.5mil tape;
I could probably fill up 5 of these data cartridges in only one reel if not more!
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Track 4 - "A fantasy"
This is just a fantasy and not to be taken too seriously, as I don't even believe in a judgmental God like in the piece.
It's just a story that expresses the frustrations about what may be perceived as being the slow evolution of mankind's conscience sometimes, but hey we're all doing what we can I guess... ;)
And on a more technical note I recorded the drums on tape at 60 ips (inches-per-second) with the Fostex E-8 (yes the machine can actually go at that speed when playing with the motor's settings inside) and played back at 30 ips to record the other tracks.
30 ips is already fast, but 60 ips looked like it was recording at fast-forward!
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Track 6 - "Playing with the big boys"
Another experiment: I transferred the tape of audio cassettes into an empty 7" reel of 1/4' width in order to record with the Fostex E-8 reel-to-reel 8 track recorder at the speed of 30 inches per second (normal speed for cassettes is 1 7/8ips!)
I was afraid that the tape would slide up and down on the heads but surprisingly it stayed quite stable: I made 2 rows of cassette tape in the reel, one row being used just to keep the other tape row stable (the one used for playing/recording)).
The tape is a little bit more than 1/8" in width and uses up 5 tracks out of 8.
A fun experiment!
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Track 11 - "Boring day... (just passing time...)"
I recorded the "bass drum" for this piece by quickly hitting the tape with a magnet while playing.
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Tracks 3, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are "BASE" (Beat Accompaniment Sound Exploration) where only one sound is used in its different ranges (low, mid and high frequencies).
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© 2010 Max Songs Club