The only vocal training I had was playing with a tape recorder as a kid, and you know, doing the beginning of the ‘Lone Ranger’ show, with a hearty hi-o silver, and just having fun, never really thinking I would be an announcer.
I remember listening to Eddie Murphy’s Delirious on cassette tape – you might have to explain what that is to your younger demographic – with my father. I wanted to make people laugh that hard.
The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don’t do a lot of reading anymore except on tape.
I mean, I haven’t been around very long. I can’t expect everyone to have seen ‘The House Bunny’. Oh God. I am having such waves of internal embarrassment, which now I’m admitting on a tape recorder. This is so one of the things I should keep in my head.
There’s a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn’t just go on tape cassettes and say, ‘America sucks.’ He recites poetry; he finds things that ‘America sucks’ rhymes with.
In Portland, I am more involved in the details of trade discussions because I’ve been around that sport longer and can watch tape and can give some input to the drafting process. In football, not at all. It’s so specialized.
All the dialogue on tape, and we’d play the tape in performance. Then I thought it’d be interesting if the actor’s repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we’d get a web of language.
I made my entire first tape using Beats headphones – the studio headphones and halfway through the second one, because I finally started making a home studio. But I record and make all my beats with the Beats headphones.
Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.
If I’m riding my bike I just replay the same scenarios over and over in my head, like I haven’t had a new mental adventure since high school. So that’s what I like about books on tape, so my mind can’t wander anywhere.
It’s like that Simpsons joke – they’re filming a cow in a movie and they go, ‘OK, we’ll tape a bunch of cats together to make a cow’, and it’s like, ‘Why don’t you just use a cow?’. For some reason that is novel – like, ‘Oh, my guitar sounds like a piano and now if I can just get my piano to sound like my guitar’.
People simply don’t have room, physical room, to keep, for instance, 2-inch tape in the sort of quantities that are required to hold a full archive. It’s not just a matter of having three or four boxes, it’s 40, 90 boxes of 2-inch tape, and very few people have the resources that sort of stuff properly.
Allison Jones, a big casting director out there, was like, ‘They’re casting ‘The Daily Show’ right now – you should submit a tape.’ I remember leaving school to go shoot an audition.
Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It’s a creative process.
I had actually sent an audition tape for Simon Pegg’s movie ‘Hot Fuzz,’ which came to nothing. Four years after the film released, out of nowhere, I got a call saying the producers of ‘Game of Thrones’ wanted me to play Hodor after they had seen that particular tape.
You play a team for the second time, you definitely have some familiarity. I think it’s beneficial for your players that they have some tape to look at of the opponent and can focus on the individual matchups that they have some current history to draw from.
Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.
