PROCESS:
Contact mic’ed a microcassette recorder (my only current working tape deck). Measured 86.48 BPM using the manual tempo tap on a Line6 POD-XT. Meditated over the lulling beat with a guitar. Pickups were thrown out-of-phase and then the guitar signal was sent through delay, auto-swell and phaser. There’s also a Paulstretched A-chord strum (24x) behind the track.
Dedicated to all my (patient) ashtanga teachers through the years.
Rig: Olympus Pearlcorder S950 Microcassette Recorder, K&K Electric contact mics, Jolie (custom Gibson ES-335 Dot Reissue), Paulstretch (Windows standalone), Ibanez DMD2000 Digital Delay, Line6 POD-XT (phaser, auto-swell and “analog” delay), djembe loops, tamborine
PROJECT:
Step 1: Record the sound of your tape deck in play mode. Make note of the rhythm inherent in your tape deck: at what BPM does it progress?
Step 2: Create a short new piece of music — simple, atmospheric, lightly rhythmic — that has the same BPM as the tape deck.
Step 3: Make a recording that combines your new piece of music and the sound of the tape cassette deck at close to equal volume. Almost certainly, the rhythm of the deck and the rhythm of your composition won’t match up exactly. (You can accomplish this in one of two ways. You can simply combine the two recordings into one — or, more complexly, you can record your track to a cassette and play it back on your deck, in order to record the music and the deck simultaneously; adjusting the volume in this scenario will be complicated, but the rhythmic discrepancies might end up with more nuance.)
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More on this 49th Disquiet Junto project at:
disquiet.com/2012/12/06/disquiet0049-deckduet/
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/