box of cassettes......and 5 observations

Remember cassette tapes........?? I remember when I used to see them as things of beauty........you know, an affordable medium for me to put my music on etc......sweet....!! Some of you know that recording music has been a part of me ....well.... for a good long while. I remember as a kid being totally facinated by a cheap tape recorder. How cool was that....! My dad had an old cassette tape recorder that actually had a small hand held microphone with it.......man, I used to take that thing through the yard just looking for different things to record.....so from early on I got the recording bug. Confession time now: My first "real" music recording that I can remember other than my dad recording me and my brother singing Pinocchio etc....was when I recorded myself singing "disco duck". That's right. Disco duck! I had the 45rpm record and the flip side was just the instrumental version of the song. I set up my dad's tape player and mic, turned on my record player and I was recording. Crazy?....yeah..it was crazy, but fun. Now I do pretty much all my recording via computer, but I put myself through an experience recently that had me remembering when that was not the case.
I've got a box of cassette tapes in the top of my office closet, ..........mostly old music demo stuff from the past. Recently, I went through the box and picked out some that had music on them that I wanted to one day put on my computer so I could burn Cd's of some of this "classic" stuff.......that most people wouldn't care to hear but myself.
Well, I did just that this past weekend with a set of songs I recorded with a friend back in 1994 and here are my "observations":

1. Cassettes are noisy......noisy...nooooisy!! All that analog hiss....wow! How did we ever put up with it.

2. Cassettes seem very ineficient to me now. I mean, all that fastforwarding and rewinding......especially when you are used to just "hitting" the forward or backward button on a CD player etc...to change tunes.

3. Boy was the quality of my old recordings lacking. I used to think some of my old recordings were pretty good.........perhaps I was self-deceived. The playing was ok,.....the singing was great (becaues it wasn't me). But the quality of it all is not very good by my new digital standards.

4. It's funny how some songs I used to really, really think highly of that don't really impress me anymore. Songs I spent probably hours working on that have lost most of their appeal.

5.It's funny how some songs I used to really, really think highly of.................that I still think highly of and worth recording.

If you actually took the time to finish reading this post, then you are probably in your mid 40's and found it somewhat amusing that someone actually sat down and took the time to write about cassette tapes.
At least now I can burn a CD for my amusement!!! (though I really need to do it again....my output mix volume on the computer was lower than I realized..!)
But I think my wife will listen to it with me.