ndiamone
600 Club - QQ All-Star
So as everybody who has known me for longer than twenty two and a half minutes knows, (30 if it's DMM) I joined the Period-Incorrect Artist on a Dead Format world a number of years ago as a gag.
Before guys were putting e.g. Madonna and Nickelback onto Edison cylinders I was putting SACDs and DTSs and etc onto 4-track 15 IPS half inch and then striking 3-3/4 IPS Q-8 dubs off of that to cart-wind into this plethora of shells I kept inheriting over and over and over - and giving em to friends along with selling them online where they were CLEARLY LABELED AS NON-FUNCTIONAL ART REPRODUCTIONS - falling under ``parody'' status in copyright law (see below).
Meaning if those guys tried to dupe newbies and flunkies and whatever then they have to answer for that one themselves.
Anyway as everybody also knows - for the first time in nearly 20 years I have been able to actually ACCESS my storage downtown 3 hrs away in San Jose and unearth all manner of copyright-status-unknown/indeterminate studio safety dubs of music that's lain unheard for 50 or 60 yrs.
Since they are ALREADY in the 4-track 15 IPS format, I've started running them off through the dubber since somebody gave me a PALLET ful of genuine BASF chrome loop tape pancakes and another PALLET ful of the same thing for bin-loop mastering - all leftover from GRT in Nashville that used to dub all the Chromium cassettes for the big labels and contemporary-Christian artists who were doing it years before the big labels were.
A third thing all my fanboys and flunkies know is - when I was their age I inherited a huge load of mis-dubbed 8-tracks that all ran at 7-1/2 IPS instead of the normal 3-3/4 - meaning a one-album tape now took up tape enough for a double album and so on and so on. Obviously in those days of 5.95 a tape prices, what poor music lover with no pocket money is going to turn down free music regardless of what's wrong with it.
So big deal you have to press the FF button on the deck and turn it up a bit to hear it through what was later discovered to be an attenuation circuit attached to the FF button so you wdnt have to hear the high pitched screeching of a double-speed playback.
Since most 8-track players other than the super-cheap ones have a FAST FORWARD button on them - I decided even with the chrome loop tape and the chrome bin master tape - that I would dub all these at 7-1/2 in quad (whether upmixed/ran thru a QSD-10 or discrete) and make 2-tape or 3- or 4-tape sets of things that would ordinarily have had only 1 or 2 - and then start putting things that were never on 8-track in the first place or were ran off in extremely limited - and poor quality - numbers (e.g. Springsteen Live `75 `85).
So now that I have my studio up and my ten tons of unreleased or limited release copyright-indeterminate master tapes back on their right shelves in the right order - I'm starting back up to do the exact same thing - and need some flunkies/trainees who want to spool tape and wind carts and print out reproduction labels and stick em on and put on foil and replace pads and etc etc etc.
For the modern listener, all he has to do to enjoy those quadruple high-fidelity reproduction dubs himself (chrome tape, 7-1/2 IPS next-to-real-time dubbing (30 for 15 and 15 for 7-1/2) and Dolby) is to go in and clip the attenuation circuit out of the path of the FF button.
As far as copyright goes - if you look it up - anything that ``a normal everyday American'' could not reasonably play straight off the format in the modern age of digital electronics without putting it into the computer to manipulate - is covered under `non-functional art' clauses the same as the Edison cylinders. Which means you can't cut anything at 33 or 45 and get away with it but you CAN cut anything at 16 or 78 (or 12 or 24 RPM which has also been done lately).
Same with tape. According to copyright law - you can cut an 8-track at anything other than 3-3/4 and be OK - you can cut a 4-track NAB cartridge at anything other than 3-3/4 or 7-1/2 you can cut a 1958 RCA Quick Load at any speed at all since its over 50 yrs old - same with Grey Audograph or Edison Voicewriter - you can cut a cassette at anything other than 1-7/8 and so on and so on and be fine.
In the case of NAB carts - the big combination cart-player/splice finders run at 22-1/2 IPS - so you can remove the attenuation circuit and cut tapes at that speed and be fine - same with cassettes being between-speed (1-13/32 making a C-90 into a C-120) like the background music players used to be and so on and so on.
So come have fun with us in the totally legal world of period-incorrect artists on funky formats.
Before guys were putting e.g. Madonna and Nickelback onto Edison cylinders I was putting SACDs and DTSs and etc onto 4-track 15 IPS half inch and then striking 3-3/4 IPS Q-8 dubs off of that to cart-wind into this plethora of shells I kept inheriting over and over and over - and giving em to friends along with selling them online where they were CLEARLY LABELED AS NON-FUNCTIONAL ART REPRODUCTIONS - falling under ``parody'' status in copyright law (see below).
Meaning if those guys tried to dupe newbies and flunkies and whatever then they have to answer for that one themselves.
Anyway as everybody also knows - for the first time in nearly 20 years I have been able to actually ACCESS my storage downtown 3 hrs away in San Jose and unearth all manner of copyright-status-unknown/indeterminate studio safety dubs of music that's lain unheard for 50 or 60 yrs.
Since they are ALREADY in the 4-track 15 IPS format, I've started running them off through the dubber since somebody gave me a PALLET ful of genuine BASF chrome loop tape pancakes and another PALLET ful of the same thing for bin-loop mastering - all leftover from GRT in Nashville that used to dub all the Chromium cassettes for the big labels and contemporary-Christian artists who were doing it years before the big labels were.
A third thing all my fanboys and flunkies know is - when I was their age I inherited a huge load of mis-dubbed 8-tracks that all ran at 7-1/2 IPS instead of the normal 3-3/4 - meaning a one-album tape now took up tape enough for a double album and so on and so on. Obviously in those days of 5.95 a tape prices, what poor music lover with no pocket money is going to turn down free music regardless of what's wrong with it.
So big deal you have to press the FF button on the deck and turn it up a bit to hear it through what was later discovered to be an attenuation circuit attached to the FF button so you wdnt have to hear the high pitched screeching of a double-speed playback.
Since most 8-track players other than the super-cheap ones have a FAST FORWARD button on them - I decided even with the chrome loop tape and the chrome bin master tape - that I would dub all these at 7-1/2 in quad (whether upmixed/ran thru a QSD-10 or discrete) and make 2-tape or 3- or 4-tape sets of things that would ordinarily have had only 1 or 2 - and then start putting things that were never on 8-track in the first place or were ran off in extremely limited - and poor quality - numbers (e.g. Springsteen Live `75 `85).
So now that I have my studio up and my ten tons of unreleased or limited release copyright-indeterminate master tapes back on their right shelves in the right order - I'm starting back up to do the exact same thing - and need some flunkies/trainees who want to spool tape and wind carts and print out reproduction labels and stick em on and put on foil and replace pads and etc etc etc.
For the modern listener, all he has to do to enjoy those quadruple high-fidelity reproduction dubs himself (chrome tape, 7-1/2 IPS next-to-real-time dubbing (30 for 15 and 15 for 7-1/2) and Dolby) is to go in and clip the attenuation circuit out of the path of the FF button.
As far as copyright goes - if you look it up - anything that ``a normal everyday American'' could not reasonably play straight off the format in the modern age of digital electronics without putting it into the computer to manipulate - is covered under `non-functional art' clauses the same as the Edison cylinders. Which means you can't cut anything at 33 or 45 and get away with it but you CAN cut anything at 16 or 78 (or 12 or 24 RPM which has also been done lately).
Same with tape. According to copyright law - you can cut an 8-track at anything other than 3-3/4 and be OK - you can cut a 4-track NAB cartridge at anything other than 3-3/4 or 7-1/2 you can cut a 1958 RCA Quick Load at any speed at all since its over 50 yrs old - same with Grey Audograph or Edison Voicewriter - you can cut a cassette at anything other than 1-7/8 and so on and so on and be fine.
In the case of NAB carts - the big combination cart-player/splice finders run at 22-1/2 IPS - so you can remove the attenuation circuit and cut tapes at that speed and be fine - same with cassettes being between-speed (1-13/32 making a C-90 into a C-120) like the background music players used to be and so on and so on.
So come have fun with us in the totally legal world of period-incorrect artists on funky formats.
Last edited: