Film and video game composer David Hilowitz found a tape recorder from the 60s in a thrift store and used it to put together a Tape Piano Sample Library.
When I was little I had a thick lisp like tearing a wet phone book, but didn't know anything was wrong; I sounded fine to me. In fifth grade, in Fresno, they signed me up with a speech therapist, where every few days I'd leave class early and go to a special room in the school and have a session with this /beautiful, sweet young woman/ who must have been in her early twenties. (Years later I bought all of Melanie Safka's records; she looked and sounded just like the speech therapist.) (And the actress who played Georgia in the film /Four Friends/ also gave me that vibe like ten years after that.)
Anyway, the therapist had a little transistor reel-to-reel tape recorder, and she recorded me saying, "Sally sells seashells down by the seashore." When she played it back, I was fascinated and mortified at how I sounded. It took that woman about six weeks of, say, twice-a-week twenty-minute sessions to cure my lisp, that's all, because unlike every other situation in my life where I was expected to work to be someone I wasn't (yet), there was zero rebellion in me against her.
Cut ahead to the middle oh-ohs, maybe 2006, 2008. Juanita made me get up at like 4am and go with her to her Morris Dance friends' /singing up the sun/ party for an equinox or a solstice. Afterward we were all in the host people's house having doughnuts and coffee and bacon and eggs. Juanita friend Tesser answered a boy's question about battery numbers for his phone. The boy said, "How do you /know/ that?" I said, from across the room, "Because she sells C-cells down at the cell store."
Back to 1967 or '68. I begged my mother for a tape recorder just like that one and I got one and recorded everything: the dog, honking the car horn, pretending to be on the radio, playing records into the mic, hiding it behind the couch to secretly record other people watching teevee, the whole thing. Your first tape recorder is a huge chunk of the inside of your head for the rest of your life. I just delivered the sound effects and music for the first play of Mendocino Theatre Company's coming-out-of-covid season, and now I'm gathering material to do my radio show tomorrow night. The first plays I worked on at MTC, I used a reel-to-reel TEAC deck for four-channel sound effects in 1984.
The first girl I ever kissed on the mouth, we were coming back from Melanie records at her neighbor-house-taking-care-of gig. I had forgotten all about that. /Ring The Living Bell/.
So glad my post unlocked these memories, for you, Marco, and that you decided to share them here. All that comes to my mind when I think about tape decks is using a pencil to rewind the tapes that got chewed up.
When I was little I had a thick lisp like tearing a wet phone book, but didn't know anything was wrong; I sounded fine to me. In fifth grade, in Fresno, they signed me up with a speech therapist, where every few days I'd leave class early and go to a special room in the school and have a session with this /beautiful, sweet young woman/ who must have been in her early twenties. (Years later I bought all of Melanie Safka's records; she looked and sounded just like the speech therapist.) (And the actress who played Georgia in the film /Four Friends/ also gave me that vibe like ten years after that.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the therapist had a little transistor reel-to-reel tape recorder, and she recorded me saying, "Sally sells seashells down by the seashore." When she played it back, I was fascinated and mortified at how I sounded. It took that woman about six weeks of, say, twice-a-week twenty-minute sessions to cure my lisp, that's all, because unlike every other situation in my life where I was expected to work to be someone I wasn't (yet), there was zero rebellion in me against her.
Cut ahead to the middle oh-ohs, maybe 2006, 2008. Juanita made me get up at like 4am and go with her to her Morris Dance friends' /singing up the sun/ party for an equinox or a solstice. Afterward we were all in the host people's house having doughnuts and coffee and bacon and eggs. Juanita friend Tesser answered a boy's question about battery numbers for his phone. The boy said, "How do you /know/ that?" I said, from across the room, "Because she sells C-cells down at the cell store."
Back to 1967 or '68. I begged my mother for a tape recorder just like that one and I got one and recorded everything: the dog, honking the car horn, pretending to be on the radio, playing records into the mic, hiding it behind the couch to secretly record other people watching teevee, the whole thing. Your first tape recorder is a huge chunk of the inside of your head for the rest of your life. I just delivered the sound effects and music for the first play of Mendocino Theatre Company's coming-out-of-covid season, and now I'm gathering material to do my radio show tomorrow night. The first plays I worked on at MTC, I used a reel-to-reel TEAC deck for four-channel sound effects in 1984.
The first girl I ever kissed on the mouth, we were coming back from Melanie records at her neighbor-house-taking-care-of gig. I had forgotten all about that. /Ring The Living Bell/.
So glad my post unlocked these memories, for you, Marco, and that you decided to share them here. All that comes to my mind when I think about tape decks is using a pencil to rewind the tapes that got chewed up.
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