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…

Jeff Healey – See The Light Audio Cassette

Yngwie Malmsteen – Trial by Fire: Live in Leningrad

If there were a definitive list of things that should have been left back in the 1980s, I think even a large number of modern rock fans would agree that the concept of “Hair Metal” would be on it.

But at its best, ‘eighties “Hair Metal” was something whose technical spectacle was mind boggling. It could so easily be mocked, as the movie This is Spinal Tap demonstrated with the epitome of aplomb. And it could also rank among the most proficient displays of musicianship across any genre in that era. If you were fed up with buying albums on which the lead vocalist appeared at the top of the personnel listing, this one might provide the change you were looking for…