Tape delays

[JWBarlow at aol.com]

Hi Doug:

I think both your ideas are very good. I have a whole bunch of Walkman type 
tape players/recorders which I've been wanting to turn into some type of long 
delay units. I think it would be a fair amount of work, however. 

Many years ago I had a friend who would open a cassette tape and move the 
take up reel to a second (empty) cassette looping the tape out the window of 
the supply box and into the window of the take up box and across all the tape 
paths of course. This allowed the use of two cassette machines to be used as 
a 7 to 8 second Terry Reily type tape delay system. This actually worked 
quite well.

I believe one would need to have pull the tape out through the open part of 
the cassette, and then do a hell of a lot of work to make an isolated loop 
like on many 1" and 2" tape machines. I hope someone else has an easier way, 
but to see if you like the sound, you may want to try the method I've 
described above -- remember to figure out which deck runs faster and use that 
as your take up deck.

And yes! I'd like to see a Paup(ul)er Electronics page too!

John Barlow

In a message dated 5/28/99 7:14:52 AM, dougt at cancerboard.ab.ca writes:

>I would modify old cassette mechanisms and 
>electronics for this, adding extra heads, variable speed, 
>feedback, etc. I think that this could be a lot of fun! Has 
>anyone else tried this?
>
>I obtain many of my experimentation parts from scrapping 
>old electronics. If you know what you are doing, a LOT of 
>$$ can be saved this way.

 Do you think that a website for this is a 
>good idea? Maybe call it "The Electronic Peasant" or 
>something? Maybe this has already been done and I'm wasting 
>my time?