For bedroom beat-makers and home-studio engineers today, music software, digital boards and CD burners are second nature. But in the not-so-distant past, recording music was a little bit more of an ordeal, where a demo tape either meant booking studio time weeks in advance or shelling out a lot of money to Tascam, Maxell & TDK.

Most of the music on Madlib Medicine Show #5: The History of the Loop Digga, was created from beats stored on floppy disc, created on SP-1200, and recorded & mixed on a Tascam 8-track, 1/4-inch reel-to-reel, or Tascam 8-track cassette deck. (Even the debut Quasimoto album was recorded on 8-track cassette.)

Photos — 1-2: Crate Digga's Palace; 3-5: Madlib & Declaime circa 1998; 6-11: Crate Diggas Palace reels dating back to '94. Pics 1-5 by DJ Design.





















