Djing with cassette players

[funke]

After watching a video of DJ Ruthless Ramsey, I was wondering if anyone else has mixed with cassette players and what model cassette players did you use? It seems like it would be alot of fun.

[c0nsul]

I did it once. I used an old pioneer cassette player. You were able to set (kind of) cue point in front of each song. fast forward and rewind stopped at this point. And when you pressed PLAY and FFWorRWD at the same time, you could hear the scrolling. But I wasn´t able to route the cassette player decks to different channels, so the mix was very, very rough.

[TMAS]

I just read an interview w/ DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist the other day where one of them said they're doing it on their next tour.

[funke]

The process would involve buying cassette players and tapes, removing the covers of the cassette players to get to the knobs, recording songs of the same bpm and prepping each song to the first beat on the tape with one song per tape. Beat matching would be insanely easy assuming the play button and start speed was responsive. Are some tape players direct drive or belt driven like turntables? I could see a problem with stretched belts. Is there something about Ruthless Ramsey's dual tape stereo's that make them more favorable besides having two decks each?