Vintage: When synths used cassette tape for data

Introducing Cassette Tape

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, with the rapid expansion of synthesisers along with home music keyboards featuring sound-editing capabilities, it was necessary to find a medium on which to store user-created patches, waveforms, voices and other data.

In an era before widespread availability or adoption of removable disks or portable RAM solutions such as cartridges, manufacturers turned to the compact cassette.

Still a relatively new format, but rapidly gaining in popularity among consumers in the early ’70s, the humble cassette tape became a medium not just for recording and playback of music and voice, but also for data storage.

Of course, anyone (particularly in Europe) who owned an 8-bit computer in the early ’80s would be familiar with the cassette tape, used for loading in commercial games and other software, as well as for preserving any programming efforts the user created. Some systems came with their own dedicated cassette recorder, while others simply let you plug in any reasonable deck for use with your micro.

A number of synth and keyboard manufacturers had the same idea.

Korg, Roland, Yamaha, Casio, Sequential Circuits and Philips all had various models which either came with a built-in cassette recorder, or could be connected to one, so as to save from and load data into the memory. Without this, data could easily be lost, either at power off or if any internal backup battery failed or was replaced.

Today’s musicians might think that sounds a bit clunky — just as modern computer users can’t believe tapes were required to load software onto vintage computers.

Perhaps a bit clunky, but it was a cost-effective and relatively reliable method of storing and retrieving data. And in the exciting new world of sound creation, increasingly more affordable and available to non-professional home users, a widely available format was welcome.

Even if your particular instrument didn’t have a built-in cassette deck, you could pick up a relatively cheap machine and a pack of tapes and begin storing – maybe even sharing – your own sound creations.

Models with Tape

Instruments which used cassette tape for storage included:

Korg

• The Polysix and Trident MkII both had a cassette port to attach an external tape recorder for storing and retrieving data in the patch memory slots.
• The Poly-800 offered patch backup via cassette tape. As unmodified instruments lacked System Exclusive features, and batter backup was patchy, this was a more reliable method of saving data.

Roland

• The JUPITER 8 (JP-8) has tape input and output jacks to enable data storage on an external recorder.
• The JX-3P offered external tape storage and retrieval despite being able to utilise MIDI. The JX-8P included a memory cartridge instead.
• The MC-4 and MC-8 MicroComposer machines could use standard cassette tapes for storage. Notably it took a long time to save/load and verify music – around fifteen minutes per minute of song duration. Roland also offered the MTR-100 digital cassette recorder as an option. These are all rare instruments which sold few units during their production run.

Yamaha

• A number of the DX and TX synths had a cassette interface. Early models featured three 1/8″ cable sockets to connect to headphone, microphone and remote sockets of a cassette recorder, while the TX81Z, for example, used an 8-pin DIN socket interface.
• The QX21 MIDI sequencer boasted SysEx capabilities but also allowed data to be stored on cassette.

Casio

• In the CZ series of synths, at least the CZ-230S featured a tape interface based on the MSX computer system.

Sequential Circuits

• The Prophet-5‘s 120 memories can be saved to external cassette tape.

Philips

• It seems fitting that the compact cassette’s creator incorporated tape recording into its PMC100 Composer, a stereo cassette player which incorporated a two-octave keyboard and basic synth functionality.

Tape: Unusual Efficiency

Retro computer fans would be forgiven for thinking that tape was always sow, clunky and unreliable. Based on the experience of loading large software files, that’s a fair assumption.

Things were a little different when tapes were used with synths and music keyboards.

1. the data being stored was often much smaller in size – a few kilobytes at most – and was delivered in one go. Compare this to much larger, often multi-part computer files.
2. the read and write functionality on musical instrument interfaces wasn’t optimised for speed so much as reliability. Compare this to “turbo loaders” and the like on computer systems.
3. much greater error checking and data validation was employed on instruments versus early computer systems.
4. musician users weren’t typically reading and writing data as often as home computer users.

So an arguably clunky format proved perfectly adequate for its intended purpose.

Tape Replace

Unsurprisingly, as elsewhere, tapes soon fell out of favour as better storage media and equipment came along.

• Floppy disks, RAM and ROM cartridges, and even hard drives become more available and affordable.
• MIDI and especially SysEx (system exclusive) could send and receive data more quickly and reliably.
• The Atari ST and subsequent music/MIDI-capable machines greatly reduced the need for other storage solutions.

Despite this, it’s an interesting decade or so in music technology history, where a need was filling by a relatively humble and common storage medium.