Check out this cool Japanese guitar from the 80s with a built-in cassette player

[thomdunn]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/24/check-out-this-cool-japanese-guitar-from-the-80s-with-a-built-in-cassette-player.html

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[FGD135]

[Thanks1]

It’s so funny because my friend sent me the same listing. We used to have a band that was just us on guitars with beats off of an iPod, and I lamented that we didn’t have this because it would have been so much cooler to play the beats on tape off one of our guitars (or both even!).

[VeronicaConnor]

Uuuugh turn off the TV before shooting your YouTube video

[dontpanicbobby]

That’s what I thought it would look like. How’s it sound?

[Frank_Farmer1]

The tape deck could be used to record loops of your own playing,

Obviously a standard blank tape wouldn’t loop – seems you’d probably have to make your own looped tape, unless you could find one available for purchase somewhere.

These days live looping is still pretty popular, but a lot of folks prefer any of the various digital looping solutions readily available.

[hecep]

The tape deck could be used to record loops of your own playing, or with pre-recorded accompaniment — and you could control the speed/pitch of the playback, too.

During a [Mission of Burma] performance, [sound engineer Martin Swope] would record material while the band was playing a song – usually these bits would be pre-worked out (a vocal bit, drum hits, guitar noise, etc.) Then, while we went on playing, he would feed this back into the mix at the appropriate time: sometimes he had twisted the tape half-over to make it play backwards; or drop or raise the speed the tape was playing at, whatever was appropriate. (source: MoB website)

Here’s a studio example of a MoB song with tape manipulations (this time courtesy of John Weston) of the lead guitar (and some of the vocals).

Mission Of Burma - Careening With Conviction

[anon32019413]

I love guitars that are about everything except learning to play the damn guitar.

Also it’s why I love modular synthesizers.

[ficuswhisperer]

[Aleqi]

I didn’t know how bitchin tape could be till a friend lent me a tascam porta studio. Shocking what you can do with tape!

[TokyoSpark]

It seems there was a series of pre-recorded tapes you could buy to play to

[TokyoSpark]

And these seem to sell for a LOT less in Japan than in that Reverb listing

[Hypoxia]

You can’t know how much I wanted one of those back then. Alas, budget.