HOW TO: Release a fucking cassette tape

Something that's stuck with me for over twenty years now is how the FORMALDEHYDE JUNKIES, a band with a single decent comp appearance, one great 7" which has maintained 33% relevancy since its release (I've never seen the masses clamor for a "Repressed" cover), and a mediocre sophomore effort to their name, let the words on their epitaph read "Now don't go start your own band." It bothered me then, and it bothered me now.

I think you should absolutely start your own band and I think you should absolutely reconcile yourself with the fact that it will probably suck and the first batch of songs you write will probably suck, that's how it goes, but at least you did it, which is more than most schmucks can muster. I can't really help you over those two humps, but the day will come when you suck less and it'll follow that the songs you keep writing, as well as how you play them, will suck less, and then you'll fix yer brain on releasing something, and that is where I can give you a tip or two. If you've read any of my reviews, god knows, we both know a good amount of you need it. If you're wondering where the hell I get off, behold!, the credentials enumerated: I ran a label for 13 years and have laid out countless j-cards and inserts for my own bands, as well as picking up the numerous dropped balls of bands too lazy to do it themselves. I was also bad at it, but then, through constructive criticism and consistent practice and experimentation, I think I got better, and, hopefully, I continue to get better at this until the day I die.

The long and short? There's not a 100% correct way to release a fucking tape, but there are certainly 100% wrong ways. I sucked at releasing tapes, many of us do, but there's things we can do to make it easier (and better to look at), so let's get to the process.

STEP 0 - It's already been stated, but before anything else, you'll need a band and you'll need songs and then you'll need to record them. I'm trying to coerce ol' Bug 3 himself Kale Mouser into writing a series of columns on DIY sound engineering for us and ours, but my harassment is, to date, unsuccessful. I'm not the expert there, so the only thing I'd suggest during this preliminary stage is that, unless you really have a setlist hammered out ahead of time, I think you should write more songs than you'll need, record all of them, and then pick the best of the bunch for your first release.

STEP 1 - "The J-Card" - Okay, so you've got your band, DISHEADS, let's say, and you've recorded your six song demo, titled "Fight Them In The Streets" or whatever, congrats! You're ready for Step 1.

Despite what you may assume based on my art punk tendencies, I would suggest against reinventing the wheel if you're first learning or relearning how to do this.

As you can see below, a standard J-card is 4 inches wide by 4 inches tall. The cover (A) is 2.5 inches wide by 4 inches tall and the spine (B) is .5 inches wide by, you guessed it, 4 inches tall. And if you're doing the math or just, you know, looking, you'll know that this leaves just 1 inch of real estate to (C), which I call "the back flap." Unless a distro or record store is run by an absolute fucking psychopath (many such cases), (A), as on a shelf, or (B), as in a distro box, will always be the first thing anyone sees of your physical release, so it's important that you get this right.

(A) might seem like where you're most likely to cock it all up, but you'd honestly have to try really hard. Easy peasiest layout is BAND NAME > PICTURE > TITLE OF RELEASE. I'll get a bit more granular here in a sec, but this works for literally every sub sub subgenre, it's not just limited to d-beat shit, I promise. If you're a youth crew band, just look for a collegiate font to use for your band name, slap that live shot from your second show smack dab in the middle, and toss "We Stand Together" or something at the bottom. Try it out!

Where many have failed and where everyone who refuses to read this will continue to fail is step 1.B. This is the first portion of the process where there is objectively a right and wrong way of doing things and if you fuck it up, you should feel bad.

When you are holding a tape in your hand horizontally and looking at its spine (B), the cover (A) should always be facing up and the "back flap" (C) should always be facing towards the ground. This is a non-starter. It will look stupid and everyone will laugh at you and you won't get to play the punk festival tour circuit, so just don't do it.

Otherwise, just keep this space simple and easy to read, you truly don't need more than the name of your band and the title of the release.

There's some recent debate on how (C) should be oriented, Hampton has certainly swayed my way of thinking, but I think this space generally ends up being the freest of the three. Using my own band's cassette (and thus, the most recent cassette I've personally laid out) as an example, I believe either exhibit (D) or (E) is perfectly acceptable. (D) is how I initially laid it out and is how I've always done it, but Big Dawg Aitch made a compelling argument that (E) should be the standard, reasoning that the finished product ends up in a clear norelco, its orientation would be congruent to the cassette's, and I eventually complied after flipping a tape over and over in my hands about 50 times.

I've always taken a vibes based approach to this area. I've oriented the information both vertically and horizontally, I've included Side A/B info (probably a best practice, but a great example of a time I myself have fucked up, AND recently!), I've seen no information but art in that space, and ultimately, I've never been offended by how someone went about it, so do what looks and feels right to you after you've got (A) and (B) locked in.

STEP 2 - "The Insert" - This is clearly an afterthought for many bands, but if one of the worst people I've ever met in my entire life made any sort of positive impact on it, it was this little truism: "You can play absolutely any type of music and not put your lyrics out there, but that's not what punk is." Stopped clocks being what they are, he was right, and I've carried it with me ever since.

Yes, I'll admit it: it is scary. Putting your thoughts and opinions on paper exposes you to critique, it's a vulnerable position to be in no matter what you're saying, but, more importantly, it can and will result in you and the people reading them feel far less alone. To me, skipping this step is a non-starter, and I will mention it in the reviews section every time I catch it.

Pictured above is naught but DISHEADS lead singer Randy Riot's hungover scribblings. It looks good and does what it needs to. They don't have or know what email is, but you could include that here, as well as anything else you'd like to communicate. Just remember, the more info you include on the insert, the bigger the insert gets, and the craftier you must be makin' sure it all fits. I try to keep it to the cardstock J-card and a single 8.5 x 11 sheet of letter paper, max, and I've never been let down.

STEP 2.5 - "What Works" - Before we move on, here's a couple quick tips that I find pertinent to the previous two steps.

• If you don't feel confident in your handwriting, the two best options available to you are the fonts Microgramma Bold Extended and Trixie Plain. You have seen the former on everything from industrial construction equipment to 70s horror movie title cards, and the latter is the best digital typewriter facsimile in existence. If you have a working typewriter handy, even better. If you fuck up while using one, and you will, just backspace and throw some "x's" over whatever mistake you made. It'll look cool.
• Source patterns for dead space and backgrounds. The best place to start for that is composition notebooks and the inside of security envelopes. I've coasted on a blown out xerox of the lady on the COMES - "No Side LP" for years. Here's a couple scraps that might help if you're short on resources. The left is from a blue cheese salad dressing advertisement circa 1960s and the right is one of them aforementioned envelopes.

• Tips for the xerox itself: background low, ink density high, sharpness and contrast high, do all these first. Some of the terminology might vary from machine to machine, but check for something similar. If you can't get it to look the way you want it, shrink it, then blow it up. 75% down and back up to 150% is fool proof.
• Look for rub-off/transfer letters from the 80s/90s. Even if they've dried up, you can use the xerox method described above and cut and paste from there.
• Art wise, I'm not here to make any objective claims regarding what does and doesn't work for a punk cassette 30 people will hold onto for 3ish years before binnin' it, but if I can impart anything before we move on it's this: I think you'll probably be tempted, if you're a first studded bracelet at 22, 80s hardcore type, to hit up Keith Caves, or if you're somehow back on the basement dwelling edgelord mysterioid tip to ask Colorado-native Mark McCoy to do your cover art, but I'm gonna say that you should not. Do it yourself with pens and markers and old magazines and a xerox machine, or do it together with someone close to home that shares and understands the vision. Don't contribute to the homogenization of hardcore punk aesthetics just for the sake of expediency, build a true regional look and sound that people will appreciate, even if it sucks at first, because that level of authenticity is way more important than anything else.

STEP 3 - "Printing" - Setting stuff up for print is one of the hardest parts to get right and leads to a whole lot of frustration, but once you get it once, it's like riding a bike.

You can easily fit four standard sized J-Cards to a page for minimal waste. A hard border like DISHEADS included is prudent so you always know where to cut, or at least make sure that whatever black/color is present in your art sufficiently contrasts with the paper you use. If there's a lot of white space at the borders, I'd recommend throwing a bit of black around the finished product in a digital editing program, or adding it by gluing the finished J-card to black construction or scrap paper. In this instance, just remember to cut inside the color (or "bleed").

Where this step gets a little hairy is printing on the back of literally anything. It's driven me to tears and I've had frantic phone calls trying to iron it out, so here's a few best practices.

• Don't worry about lining it up perfectly, worry about not cutting off anything important.
• Finesse the sizes, keeping the most important side, like the front of the j-card, at 100% with the reverse to about 95%, and cut to the former.
• Add a color bleed to the reverse side as needed, so you don't have any unintentional white space.
• To line everything up by hand, get a transparency and some scotch tape. Print up four copies front and back each, stick the fronts on first, and go from there. It might make it a little harder to cut them out efficiently because they won't be machine calibrated, but no one said punk was supposed to be easy.
• If you're setting it up digitally, but still self printing, it's pretty much the same thing. You should still follow the first three bullet points, laying out the designated "important" side first, then use the transparency settings in your program of choice to position the back images as close to the center of each front as possible.
• Even when your insert is a single double sided piece of paper, there's some printing quirks that will drive you mad. If you're printing horizontally, you'll wanna flip on the short edge, vertically on the long edge, so the tops of your insert are the way you want 'em.
• When cutting stuff down to size, I'll cut down to the top side of each individual piece before moving onto each other side, and then repeat until completion. This builds in little goals and stopping points, and makes you feel like you're making progress, instead of just looking at a never diminishing stack next to one or two finished J-cards or inserts.

At the end of the day, trial and error will overcome every obstacle, but these first three + one half steps should get you through the art and printing portion of our proceedings. Now that you've got your shit all spread out, following the remaining steps will hopefully get it all in one fuggin' sock. We're close to the end and yer eyes are glazing over, but stick it out and we'll get there together.

STEP 4 - "Get Physical" - I'll be honest, this could easily have been Step Double Zero. Once you've got your recordings back from whoever, there's nothing really stopping you from ordering yer tapes and dubbing ahead of time, but the ulterior motive was establishing a baseline of preparedness lest we allow a stack of tapes and cases to languish in cat piss and cider bottles for a few months or years or decades.

You've got a few options to choose from at this point, so we'll hop into an ascending sub-list, from most to least hated, and you can CYOA, dig?

a) The perennially awful first choice one may hazard is to visit a thrift store or record store's theoretical dollar bin and buy old tapes to recycle. Yes, it's probably the most economical, netting you both tape and case in one fell swoop, and it's arguably more "earth-conscious," but it also looks and sounds like shit.

You gotta figure these tapes have already seen some wear and tear, which will significantly reduce its second lifespan. Some duplication methods won't record entirely over the tapes' original contents and you'll get Korean sermons from 2004 or 80s cock rock mixtapes leaking through (though, admittedly, if one were to work that into the presentation itself, that could be pretty cool). It's also safe to assume that no one who goes down this route will repeat the program enough times to fill up the entire runtime, which makes interacting with the tape more about how much one is willing to rewind it.

Unless you're charging $0-1 for the finished product, or you've run out mid-tour, please don't subject anyone to this.

b) Option 2 (or b, whatever) is a close relative, yet orders of magnitude better: ask your friends' bands or labels if they have blank tapes lying around. Dashed DIY label dreams and pre-tour call-outs are abundant, it's entirely possible this ends up being even cheaper than the previous method, just so they don't have to look at this shit anymore. While it has some of the same disadvantages as above, such as using a tape that wasn't lengthed with its contents in mind, it also retains most of the advantages of the best and most consistent option, which goes something like this:

c) This is the priciest option, as everything, including shipping, just keeps getting more and more unattainable, but it's still cheaper than pressing a 7 inches' worth of music to an LP: order new tapes.

There are many places from which you can do this. I've used National Audio and duplication.ca for years. They have so many different color cassette shells to choose from, often have a good variety of cases, and offer lengths starting from 3mins, allowing you to get as close to full utilization of each side as possible. Just make sure you choose tab-in cassettes, or be prepared to physically apply adhesive tape over the corners of every single cassette before Step 5 may commence.

Notably, many of these places will dub the tapes (and will cut the tapes down to most precise length if you do) and print art directly to the shells using technology most of us do not and will not ever have direct access to, though this isn't necessary in my eyes and falls slightly outside the walls of the environs this guide is meant to navigate.

There's a whole bunch of ways you can make the tape itself look cool. Paint markers and sharpies are evergreen. There's all different sizes of tape labels you can put to good use and all the advice for laying out J-cards and inserts is applicable here. One of my favorite methods is using a soldering iron to etch directly into the shells. Just remember to label yer A and B sides, and you're golden.

Last thing I'll say here is that if you end up adding plastic wrap to a DIY project, I'm fucking giving you a swirlie. What the fuck is wrong with you? Our planet's dying and you're going mersh?

STEP 5 - "The Dub" - If you've got your final recordings, as well as your tapes, in hand, you're finally ready for the Dub. When I first got started, I'd get a master tape made up somehow and make copies 1:1, which is time consuming and sucks all around, but definitely gets the job done! You can always default to that in a pinch, but here's some other, better ways.

My former label partner suggested we get a high speed tape duplicator after watching me use that method for so long and, after some quick research, she snatched up a couple used Telex models off the internet. I upgraded to the Telex ACC-4000 (pictured below) after realizing the ones we'd been using were mono, which was causing some problems with certain recordings, but you can still find either relatively easily, as churches would use them to dub sermons for elderly parishioners and have started offloading them over the last coupla decades.

In short, my method for the last decade plus has consisted simply of running an aux cord from my computer to the input of my tape deck to make a "master" tape (be sure to turn off any notification alarms and close any browsers that, god forbid, might play an ELECTRIC CHAIR EP), using digital masters divided into Side A and Side B (or using the same files if "program repeats" and all that), then placing that master into the "ORIG" slot of the Telex, and finally plopping three blanks into the other three slots.

The nitty gritty between the lines is that I check the levels throughout the process, getting as close to a consistent 0dB as possible with some light, tasteful flickering into the red while making the master on the tape deck. I'll then place that into the duplicator and run it without any blanks and adjust the channel knobs until I get that same aforementioned consistency, before finally starting to dub everything. I always make sure the machine is set to "AB," which enables dubbing on both sides simultaneously, and "Auto," which automatically rewinds all tapes before beginning and again when duplication has concluded, and remove and refill the "COPY" slots until completion. Every once in a while, the "Short Tape" lights will pop on, but this has never had a noticeable impact on any of the thousands of tapes I've duplicated.

One Telex machine can dub 3, 90min tapes in just three minutes, and can command additional units with a specialized cable as our original mono models did, so just do some quick calculations to figure how long a 5 min one takes.

Before each run, I take a handheld demagnetizer to any metal components and tape heads, then I'll quickly clean those same components with isopropyl alcohol wipes.

Another method comes courtesy of EARTH GIRL TAPES impresario, Hampton Martin.

I currently run 10 tape decks daisy chained together (the output of one deck goes into the input if the next deck, and so on) with the first deck taking an input from a digital master on my computer. I run a cable from an audio interface into the first tape deck of the chain. Occasionally use an old phone or other dedicated music playing device to play the digital master recording. Dubbed in real time for superior listening quality. I clean the decks in between dubbing jobs, and once a year I take them apart and re-calibrate them (fixing speed and bias issues).

STEP 6 - "Stuff It" - This part is fun and mostly brain dead. If you've sized and cut everything down as instructed in previous steps, you can coast through the workload after the first couple. A lot of this Step is just figuring stuff out hands-on, but my biggest tip is to no waste time or energy scoring the spine of the J-card. This took me a while to figure out for some reason (see: stupidity), but your absolute best bet is to line up the top side of your finished tape with the outer edge of your J-card, then to crease the portion of the J-card that hangs over around the bottom of the cassette, and stuff it in from there, using the norelco to make the final crease. Give it a little smoosh in there. Works every time.

Alright, you freaks, I hope you found this helpful and informative. For my part, I hope I never have to look at a low-effort, insert-less cassette tape or a J-card cut at 81 degree angles (I'm looking at you, ROACHLEG) ever again. Now, go make your own tape!

Direct all additional inquiries and hate mail to: anyonecanbethebug@riseup.net.