"I'll tell you a really cool trip: Go back and take a cassette, nobody fucks with cassettes any more but you can get some really, really cool distortion effects from cassettes. You take a piece of music, record it on to a cassette, and then distort the shit out of it, and then rerecord that again. That’s a different sound as if you were to go in and put a plug-in on it that had an effect. You are not going to get the same sound. There is a warmth to that distortion that’s there, there is a certain amount of enjoyment that you are going to listen to when you hear that. That’s the reason why rock 'n' roll is not doing very well right now as a music because the compression techniques are not the same."
And then, a mere 10 hours later, I'm reading the wikipedia page on that 1968 song "Jumpin' Jack Flash," by that band the Rolling Stones, from a time when rock'n'roll was doing pretty well. Keith Richards says this about how the song was recorded:
"I used a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic tuned to open D, six string. Open D or open E, which is the same thing - same intervals - but it would be slackened down some for D. Then there was a capo on it, to get that really tight sound. And there was another guitar over the top of that, but tuned to Nashville tuning. I learned that from somebody in George Jones' band in San Antonio in 1964. The high-strung guitar was an acoustic, too. Both acoustics were put through a Philips cassette recorder. Just jam the mic right in the guitar and play it back through an extension speaker."
