When people were looking for backward messages in music, how were they able to listen to it backwards?
Spin the record backwords by hand.
(My 1000th post)
Play a record backwards by spinning the turntable in the opposite direction. Easy enough to do manually for a small section, so everybody could get an idea of what it sounded like, even if they weren’t likely to spin it at a very constant speed. Rigging a turntable or tape player to play in the opposite direction wasn’t very difficult, either. Particularly cheap turntables with simple DC motors that you could just switch the leads on.
Let’s try this again…
Spin the record backwards by hand.
(My 1000th post)
That had to ruin the stylus pretty fast though.
That’s okay since Satan will make it up to you when you become one of his minions.
What I used to do (especially checking for all those ‘Paul Is Dead’ Beatles’ clues) was to use 2 reel to reel tape recorders - 1 monoraul and 1 stereo.
(NOTE: Casette recorders have the 2 stereo “heads” one above the other and CAN’T be used to do this).
A reel to reel stereo tape recorder has the record/ playback “head” at “track” positions 1 and 3. So, when you record on track 3 with the stereo recorder and then flip the tape reels over and play the tape on the monoraul tape recorder, the playback head picks up track 3 going in the backwards direction.
Kind of tricky to explain without a diagram. Yes, this cannot be done in “real time” but it doesn’t destroy your turntable either.
Those little 4-track cassette portastudios, which can be had for as little as $100 nowadays, are useful for this. Simply tape the music from the disc onto tracks 1 & 2, flip the cassette, and listen to the backwards signal now on tracks 3 & 4.
If you had a turntable with a rubber band drive, which were not as uncommon as you might think, you could add a twist to the rubber band, and get the LP to spin backwards. Also, with some record players, it was possible to rotate the tone arm 90° and play things backwards that way.
You used to be able to buy a stylus capable of handling this. They were very popular when rappers were first starting out and “scratching” (moving a record forward and backward quickly by hand) was popular.
Many reel to reel tape decks could play in reverse.
Nowadays it’s much easier (not to mention more consistent with results) to just open an MP3 or WAV file with a sound editor like CoolEdit and reverse it:
- File > Open
- Edit > Select Entire Wave
- Tools > Reverse
Rex: Or you could use the Praat program available from http://www.praat.org. It’s ostensibly for analyzing speech sounds; however, it’s kind of fun to manipulate the recordings!
There is a trick I used to use on open deck reel-to-reel recorders (the ones with all the hardware outside of covers) to play stuff backwards - interesting to use to add what I called “reverse reverb” to a voice.
You wrap the tape aroundthe top of the capstan wheel, then around the capstan backwards.
Here’s two crappy little diagrams I just drew up to describe the technique:
YTRMV (Your Tape Recorder May Vary) Use the above at your own risk, I assume no responsibility for any damage that may occur. All I know is it worked for me for many years.
But in that case, wouldn’t the supply reel then become the takeup reel and wouldn’t you have to turn that by hand? Also, there would be some drag caused by the takeup reel and would this affect the quality of the recording (it might cause a bit of wow and flutter) ?
Yes, those were fun days when you could physically get at the workings of machines and make your own modifications.
No.
Put empty reels on the spindles, defeat any “out of tape” cutoffs, and press Play.
The left reel will spin clockwise while the right reel will spin counterclockwise.
That keeps the tension correct. What moves the tape is the capstan and capstan wheel. All the spindle motors do is keep the tape taut against the heads.
And the quality is exactly the same as if the tape was moving in the correct direction. It eats up tape faster (destroys the oxide coating quickly) but in the days of reel-to-reel commerical production for Radio, I rarely used the same piece of tape twice, it usually got cut off and either thrown away or spliced onto an archive reel.