Using an Audio Cassette Tape as a Guitar Effect

If you can remember the days before electronic delay dropped into the affordability range of the average teenage guitarist, you may recall that somewhere around the early 1980s, the Melos echo unit was a common secondhand effect purchase among the guitar-totin’ youth.

The Melos was a tape echo device, typically costing £30 to £35 on the used market. It recorded the guitar input sound to a special type of short-length tape cassette, which then repetitively looped the recorded sound back at diminishing volume (and diminishing quality), simulating an echo.

These archaic tape echo devices, with their custom-designed cassettes, are what most older guitarists will think of when there’s mention of audio tape as a guitar effect.

But did you know that conventional blank audio tapes can be used as a crude but seriously cool guitar effect? Not as an echo, but as a tone-shaper…

The Damned – ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel’ cassette

Whether or not they were guilty of a music business sell-out, by the mid 1980s The Damned were the sole surviving remnant from 1976’s original UK punk rock scene.

Immensely important historically, but until this point scantly recognised commercially, the band must surely have felt it was time they got a break. Equally, however, they must have known that any commercial success they did get could damage their cred with longtime fans – such was the inverted snobbery of punk…

What Were the Criteria For “Professional” Audio Cassettes?

It’s a good question. What, exactly, entitled a manufacturer to brand the word “Professional” onto an audio tape? Or to describe it as “professional quality” in blurb? Was there a bench test that defined a standard of performance, above which the cassette attained suitability for professional use?