Straight From The Box

vaisvil

Straight From the Box is a piece built around the provided lyrics of Evan Harrington. It was performed in 1986 on a Casio CZ-101 using two cassette decks and a 4 mono channel mixer. (see schematic below). With this method you simply had to live with what happened in the past, so a lot of practice took place to get to even this amount of finish on the production which could be loads better. On the other hand it did force a certain amount of discipline in the form of practice and ingenuity to circumvent or hide what you know you couldn’t perform better. There was a way to “tune” the cassette decks by adjusting the motor speed so that one could transfer a cassette from one deck to the other to avoid a layer of tape noise which built up quickly. Considering really good brands of cassette decks can be found at Goodwill it is possible to do this for very little money. I have been told, but never tried, that VHS tape has even high fidelity for this method. Again, those can be found for very little money at second hand shops.

cassette deck A => L/R ==> cassette deck B
new performance => L/R =^

A word about the lyrics. Evan Harrington was one of my very best friends and provided me with much material for setting to music. Evan has passed on and is greatly missed. He was and still is a constant inspiration.