Stereo

I was on leave from school, lounging around at home, and ended up writing a few songs.
I roughly recorded guitar and vocals onto an Aiwa cassette to check them out — hmm, not bad — feeling pretty full of myself, when I spotted an old silver stereo someone had thrown out on the street and picked it up.
Nothing was really broken; I swapped the fuse and it worked fine.
A double-deck unit, the kind of stereo that looked cool enough to show up in a hip-hop music video.
Then it occurred to me — I wanted to layer drums and bass on top of the guitar and vocals, which would normally mean buying a 4-track recorder, but I figured there was a way around it.
I put a blank tape in the stereo, hit record, and recorded a drum channel using the wardrobe as a kick drum and the desk as a snare — something like boom-tap, boom-boom-tap, on repeat.
Then I hit play, set the Aiwa cassette player in front of the stereo speakers, put in another blank tape, played the drums back through the stereo, and played bass along with it at the same time.
Since I couldn’t actually mix, I recorded while adjusting the Aiwa’s position and the bass volume by ear.
Now the Aiwa tape had a track with drums and bass on it.
I put that tape back into the stereo and overdubbed guitar and vocals the exact same way.
And, somehow, a demo tape of my very own — with drums, bass, guitar, and vocals all in it — was complete.
The sound quality was, well, muffled as hell, but who cares, I had fun.