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Synths on Tape Presented by Dogbotic

  • Vintage Synthesizer Museum 1200 North Avenue 54 Los Angeles, CA, 90042 United States (map)

Synths-On-Tape: A Hands-On Music Making Workshop is a live, two hour event specially intended for music producers, composers, creative engineers, and folks who enjoy strange sounds.

Have you ever wanted to make music on tape but didn’t know where to start? Ever wanted to turn a walkman into a musical instrument? Are you bored with making music on your computer and want to actually touch some stuff? If you said yes well goodness this is gonna be the event of the year for you.

Join Dogbotic and Vintage Synth Museum for a workshop about how to make music with affordable consumer tape players (which were quite fashionable until the early ‘00s). We’ll show you how magnetic tape works, the many ways you can play with it, and suggestions for how you can mess with the inside to get it to make new sounds. We’ll be joined by an array of VSM’s incredible synthesizers, which you’ll get to play with and commit to tape.

A small handful of the things we’ll cover:

• how a walkman actually works (and why it’s so dang useful)

• how to record any synthesizer onto a cassette tape without it sounding like hot garbage

• how to hack any commercial cassette to let you “record on top” of it

• how to build a cassette tape loop

• how to modify the circuitboard to change the pitch of your tape loop

• how to control your walkman’s pitch and volume with light (or another synthesizer)

No experience or musical ability is required! Please note this is a hands-on demo workshop, and while you’ll leave with many ideas on stuff you can make, you won’t leave with “a thing.” Just FYI.

This is a LIVE, IN-PERSON workshop with real, carbon-based instructors! We will be meeting from 6-8 PM on Friday, May 10th, at Vintage Synthesizer Museum,

Resgister here: CLICK FOR TICKET