3DoF - Dictaphone Music

Hello all,

Recently I have acquired 2 exciting pieces of gear: an old Sanyo dictaphone, and an Audio Interface. This has opened up a lot of possibility for me to create new music and to explore previously uncharted territory for me.

I sat down at my piano and recorded a 7ish minute long improv; nothing fancy, just a few chords and twiddles. This was recorded by the dictaphone onto microcassette, my new favourite medium! It just gives the piano such a warm sound and is so very mournful. I then played this back though my interface with a mic as well to help capture some of the tape playback sounds. In VCV rack I was running a few effects, namely Plateau, Chronoblob, and Smokes.

The end result was this, a new track that I’m releasing as the first single for my upcoming 2hr ambient album, so watch this space!

The patch (simple though it is) is available over at Patchstorage if you want to explore:
https://patchstorage.com/author/mcmij/

Thanks all for reading this, and taking the time to listen to my music. That’s what I love about this forum, everyone genuinely seems interested and cares about everyone else and their achievements. In particular, thanks to all who gave me advice setting up my interface, we got there (mostly!) in the end, especially @rsmus7

Bye, Jim

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Nice piano playing, and I love the tape noises and how the recording makes it sound warm & slightly distant. Super cool & looking forward to your new album!

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Thanks Adi. It hopefully shouldn’t be too long, but school starts soon and A Levels kick in, so it might take a bit longer than planned. Not much to do though, just a bit of level tweaking

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Right, slight change of plan :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I’m enjoying my dictaphone so much, I’ve started recording more pieces and improvisations with it. I’ll use this thread as a place to post all of these pieces.

Tonight’s experiment was with a favourite voice of mine on my Yamaha PSR-E423 keyboard: voice number 149 - UndrHeim. I recorded a short improv on this patch to tape, then processed it in VCV with some reverb from plateau, ambience from clouds, and some nasty glitchy delay from jira jira, thus giving the piece its name: dirty delay dictaphone. Enjoy, this time with Raw Audio

EDIT: patch is over at patchstorage again: https://patchstorage.com/author/mcmij/

5 Likes

It’s been a while, but I’ve just come into ownership of a lovely Realistic Dictaphone, complete with half speed! Out of this spawns a new EP, but only remixes of older tracks as I’m quite tied down with work at the moment

It’s a little more experimental than some of the others I’ve put out, and more focused on the sound and timbre produced instead of the musical development, but that is what is so intriguing about these little boxes to me. Certainly this new device has a whole wealth of sounds to be discovered within its micro-cassette world!

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