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As time marches on, and my studio enters an adolescent stage in the time department (provisionally it is vast, but it lacks concision, coherence and immediate usability in most situations), I feel a duty to serif the "i"'s and "t"'s I crossed a year ago in culturing regions of interest in equipment types through obtaining things like cassette blanks, cassette players/recorders, etc. Well, while my 2024 self would be dismayed but not shocked to hear this, I haven't yet as of Feb 2026 done anything with tape. But I think I can change this soon; see, a major reason I've held off is due to not wishing to squander tapes on unmastered audio, as I have means to use digital disks and such for work and storage. But the idea of using the deprocated magnetic tape format for something data-pertinent, like sequencing and the like, is bound to get me using these facilities, as I've always been mystified by SMPTE and like technologies which saw tape used as a medium (often concurrent to audio information on the same reels/tapes) to re-program and sync amnesiac articles of the 70s, 80s, 90s.

Reservation; upon closer inspection of the Tascam MTS-30, it seems it only stripes clock data; while this is declared in nearly every listing of the item, it is still mysterious to me as I haven't discovered any (real) advantages of MIDI clocks on my own; I use sequencers is a basic way, currently to just trigger percussion, or when I'm operating at a higher level, different synths in conjunction with percussion. I intend to extend the employ of the sequencer to include effects units, as well as hard disk recorders or even MIDI mixers. The compositional and administrative/facilitative parts of the songwriting and songplaying processes will be MIDIfied, if my dreams are to be realized.

The point of these forays into niche avenues of music tech is ultimately to increase aptitude through the acquaintance with all the varying sausagemaking rituals. MIDI is exciting as its a direct control mechanism for music hardware (and software) to conduct devices of virtually any class; synthesizers, samplers, effects units, sequencers, etc.