How to do a tape release
If you’ve thought about starting your own tape label or considered releasing your own music on cassette then good news; it’s probably easier and cheaper than you think!
There’s nothing special about anything we do at Egg Towers that can’t be replicated by anyone else. On this page I’m going to outline the production process that we follow and cover some simple tricks that should make your life a bit easier if you ever decide to opt for a DIY self-release.
DIY and premium production services
DIY means different things to different people. Some folks will stand by paying for a company to handle every aspect of production and say it’s DIY because they talked to this company and paid them out of their pocket to make it happen.
Personally, I do not share this view.
To be clear, there is absolutely no shame in chosing this route. Maybe you don’t have the time or not well positioned to take on the entirety of the production process, but in my view, this does not equal a DIY approach.
Consider this – any time you pay for someone for a service, you are paying them to gain experience at that job and like many before me have said, there is no such thing as useless experience.
In doing everything yourself not only will you gain an appreciatation for every step of the process but you will also become sulf-sufficient and know what things you can easily change to better suit your personal needs.
All this being said if you’re happy to pay for someone to make tapes for you here’s a list of online duplication services;
Media Duplication Ltd
Tapeline
BandCDs
Lathe To The Grave
National Audio Company
Duplication.ca
Tapes
Quantity
Start small.
25 doesn’t sound like a lot but it soon will when you’re having to dub all the tapes yourself and do all the J cards even this turns into a significant time investment.
Only go for 100 if you’ve got at least 2 tape decks for simultaneous dubbing to get through the process or if you’ve got a few weeks spare just to sit in front of your tape deck.
Getting blank tapes
Use tapeline.
They’re by far the cheapest if you’re planning on going the DIY route and dubbing tapes yourself (what I absolutely recommend to keep costs low). If you’d like tapes to be dubbed for you it might also be worth considering bandCDs. Depending on numbers they might work out a bit cheaper – both are solid options.
Tapeline all lovely people and respond pretty promptly to direct enquiries by email, I cannot sing their praises highly enough.
Also took me a while to catch onto the fact they can cut tapes to whatever length you like. If you’ve got a 13 minute EP they can do you a batch of C13 tapes at no extra cost. Great for reducing the duration of dead air.
Unless you’re planning on selling your tapes with O card packaging make sure to pick up some plastic cases as well. I’ve had my fair shares of orders turn up without cases and only had myself to blame – always double check your order inventory!
Make sure to always check tapeline’s clearance bargains section too – they often sale batches of tapes from cancelled ordered at discounted rates. Who knows, they might have a batch of the exact length you need in the colour you want, always worth a look!
Dubbing
Skip this if you’re paying someone else to dub tapes for you.
Make sure to fast forward a little bit before dubbing your tape, make sure you’re recording on the actual tape and not the leader. If in doubt, take the cassette out and look at the bottom middle part.
Unless you’ve got a particularly shit tape deck you’ll be able to tape over a cassette many times and have it still sounds absolutely fine. For your first tape record a small sample of audio and make sure you’re not recording too loud or too quiet.
Recording direct to tape from a digital source will result in the highest possible quality. Duplicating from one tape to another will result in a loss of the top two octaves and produce a significantly more muddy sound.
I’d also recommend applying a generous high end boost via an EQ if your recording isn’t already mastered for cassette. Type 1 tapes (i.e. everything nowadays) have progressively poor response past 10k Hz.
Your mileage may vary but if you’ve got the time it’s certainly worth investing a bit of time into trying out a couple of different final EQs to achieve the best possible sound for your release.
Recording from a digital source
Make sure to use the line input on your deck, never the microphone unless you’re purposefully going for a mono recording for some bizarre reason.
Whatever device you use, be it your phone, a laptop or whatever you’ll want to ensure your tracks don’t have any unwanted gaps in between them. You could make a single big file in audacity or your audio program of choice but the easier solution is to use foobar2000.
Foobar offers gapless playback and is available on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android for the total price of £0.00. God bless open source dorks developers.
Keep a tidy ship
Having a properly maintained deck is essential for a good quality dub.
See my zine on this subject for a detailed rambling (free .pdf available here) but the crux of the matter is this;
CLEAN YOUR TAPE HEAD AFTER DUBBING EACH SIDE OF A CASSETTE.
Newly manufactured cassettes can vary greatly in their composition and more often than not a brand new cassette has a lot of material that will be shed directly onto your equipment the first time it gets used.
If you’re recording on tapes longer than 15 minutes per side I recommend playing them each through your deck once to get through it in advance and have it not affect your recording.
Quality assurance
For quality assurance, listen to the final portion of your dubbed cassette for two reasons;
- Make sure the audio is balanced how you expect
- Ferric oxide residue build up might result in one channel being significantly quieter than the other
- Make sure the end of your recording made it onto the tape and didn’t end prematurely
- Shouldn’t be a problem if you’ve ordered the correct length cassettes – but it’s always good to double check for the first one.
It’s also good practice to listen to at least one tape all the way through on another device than what you’ve dubbed on. I like to use a walkman or something similar since that’s what a lot of people will be using to listen to our tapes on but the important thing is to use something other than what you’ve just recorded your tape on.
If your tape deck is running 5% faster/slower than it should (a common symptom of older decks that haven’t been shown a lot of love over the years) you won’t know unless you try playing back your dubbed tapes on something else.
J cards and printing
Printing
Every tape provider charges a lot for printing services but it’s all very easy to do at home even if you don’t have a printer. In fact I recommend not owning a printer, let that shit be someone else’s problem!
J/O cards, OBI strips, sticker templates
Duplication.ca has every kind of template you could ever ask for.
For creating your designs use either Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. The latter is free, but so is the first if you’re willing to do some cheeky Google searches…
Always give a generous bleed to your design, you’ll thank yourself later!
Make sure to use at least 300 DPI for whatever you design, go for 600 if you can.
Nobody likes a shitty low resolution J card.
Online printing services
I use Doxzoo as they’re the cheapest for what I typically order but I’ve also had good experiences with Doxdirect who to be fair are very similarly priced.
Document setup
Use something like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape to create a PDF with your design correctly set up for double sided printing. Steer clear of word processors like Microsoft Word or Google Sheets, they’re terrible at handling images. Illustrator/Inkscape allow you firstly correctly scale your images with fine adjustment and let you position images on a page exactly how you want.
A single A4 page can fit two simple 3 panel J cards and 2 OBI strips. The fine folks at Doxzoo/direct to very low/no bleed printing so you can go quite close to the edge without fear of losing anything important (a 5-10mm bleed is still a good idea just to be safe though).
If you’re not interested in OBI strips you can go as far as four 3 panel J cards on a single A4 page when using a no-bleed printer solution such as Doxzoo.
That being said I’d say if it’s your first time, best stick to a lower number and allow for a generous bleed (5-10mm).
Paper type, thickness
130gsm gloss is the one – thick enough to feel good and thin enough to easily fold without leaving seam marks
Glossy paper costs basically the same as matt printer paper and you get a better finish. Some designs might be better suited to matt, but most are best on glossy paper.
Assembly
This is going to sound silly, but don’t use scissors. For my first few releases I thought “oh it’s fine, I’ll just use scissors” until I bought a guillotine for a fiver and realised how much easier I could make life for myself. You’ll save literally hours of your life cutting paper and get a much cleaner cut on your prints.
Likewise you could fold everything by hand, if you are a fool who hates themselves. A scoring board will result in a nice straight, clean fold line every time and save you so much time.
When scoring thick paper you’ll need to use a good bit of pressure. This video does a better job of explaining this than I can in text form.
Distribution
Packing
Tapeline sell bespoke cassette mailers but these are only good for a single tape and aren’t the cheapest thing in the world.
A5 envelopes can fit up to 3 cassettes and will have spare space for buttons, zines, stickers, anthrax , sweets or bugs. I make sure to hold onto any bubble wrap from any online orders to make sure tapes in a basic paper envelope survive the trip to their new home.
Postage
Up to 3 cassettes placed next to each other are just about under the maximum size and weight limits for a large letter, but really you can go as far as 5 or maybe 6. I have yet to recieve notice from any customers for surplus shipping to be paid from using a second Large Letter stamp on order of half a dozen tapes.
A single larger letter second class stamp will set you back a whopping £1.55 and can be found at any Post Office or well stocked corner shop.
I charge £3 per tape postage here to offset the cost of stamps, packing materials and more notably; payment processor fees. This is a hidden swine which ideally you really don’t want to eat into your margins, so best to bump up the shipping a smidge to cover this cost. Any surplus from postage costs can go towards including little freebies like badges or stickers.
Conclusion
Well that about covers everything. As you might’ve gathered if you read this far, I’m quite the fan of this whole ordeal! If you have any questions about anything I’ve mentioned here please don’t hesitate to sencd me a message via the contact form.