If you want to experiment with lo-fi, an old-school cassette recorder that offers vintage tape quality and sonic imperfections is the best tool to get the authentic lo-fi grit. The medium of cassettes can give you the most perfect flutter noise and warbling pitch that a Lo-Fi song needs. Instead of emulating cassette effects with DAW plugins, why not consider a real cassette recorder?
What Types of Cassette Recorders Are Good for Lo-Fi?
Cassette recorder with line-in recording
If you are thinking about importing audio from external devices onto a cassette tape to get the authentic tape sound quality. How to transfer the recording between your audio source and the cassette recorder is important. A cassette recorder with line-in/Aux-in input can easily record your digital music onto tapes and provide you with nice “low-res” results.
Another thing is that if the tape recorder that you’ve got does not allow you to send the tape content to PC directly, you probably need to have cassettes to MP3 converter to transfer the tapes to digital formats so that you can edit the Lo-Fi audio with precise adjustments on computer.
Do you need a cassette recorder with multiple tracks?
You probably have heard there are 4-track cassette recorders and 8 track tape recorders, will this be a factor that affects the LoFi quality? Well, there’s little difference when you send tracks over to cassette from your devices.
But a multiple-track cassette recorder does have an advantage: A 4 track cassette recorder gives you the ability to record music onto different tracks, and it’s an old-school way to create authentic Lo-Fi tracks from scratch for people who play live instruments. Also, this kind of cassette recorder is usually equipped with built-in EQs and controls, this might be a plus for achieving LoFi’s grit and saturation. Unfortunately, you are not able to purchase a brand-new 4-track cassette recorder on the market as they are discontinued.
Portable cassette recorder or cassette deck?
A bulky cassette deck also lets you play and record audio cassettes, but they usually don’t come with any speakers and have to be connected to an audio system. Compared to a handheld cassette recorder, some advanced cassette decks usually have more features such as tape dubbing, CD burning, auto-reverse, hard-drive storage…
For making Lo-Fi audio, you don’t need to invest in a cassette recorder since they are so expensive and most of them are not available now.
Best Cassette Recorders for Creating Lo-Fi Music
Budget-Option: Retekess TR606 Portable Cassette Recorder with AUX line in
The small Retekess TR606 cassette player/recorder lets you record conveniently with a 3.5mm AUX line from external devices. And, it supports an external microphone to record voice. It is affordable, small, easy to use, and perfectly records tracks from PC through the MIC jack. You don’t need to spend much on a high-end cassette recorder to produce Lo-Fi cassette quality audio.
What is also good about a handheld cassette recorder is that it has two power supply modes, you can either power the recorder with batteries or a power adapter. So you don’t have to deal with messy cables.
4 Track Cassette Recorder for LoFi – Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII
The Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII is probably the most popular 4 track cassette recorder, and it’s loved by producers and instrument players. You can use it to record live music onto different tracks and make adjustments to EQ and effects directly on the device. Also, the level and pan controls on each of 4 tracks also make cassette recording pretty easy and accurate.
The Tascam Portastudio 414 MKII’s solid performance on recording and it’s also a decent choice for people who want to produce LoFi tracks. Thanks to its flexible mic/line-in and headphone inputs, you can control and monitor the recording freely. For people know how to
authentically Lofi your tracks with the Tascam Portastudio, you can see the tutorial below and you can also see how this cassette recorder work with Lofi Hip Hop instrumental from a sampler.
