Ottens, who died earlier this year, wasn’t in the music business per se. He was a Dutch electronics engineer and has been credited as being an inventor the cassette tape.
In this day of digital music streaming down from the cloud I guess many people don’t have any idea of what a game changer this little invention was back in the day.
The cassette was a way to miniaturize and simplify the reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was introduced in 1963 and peaked as far as music was concerned in the 1980s when the Sony Walkman made it easy to listen to your tunes on the go, according to Rolling Stone.
When I worked all summer to buy my first car in high school I made sure I made enough not only to pay for that used Chevy Nova, but also to buy a Sony cassette deck to install in it. To me, that was as essential a piece of equipment as the six-cylinder engine. But listening to popular songs wasn't the biggest advantage of these tapes.
The first original songs I recorded were put down on this magnetic medium. A lot of demos were created on the little plastic reel-to-reels one of which I handed off to Glen Campbell’s eldest daughter who promised they would listen to it. Although I never heard back about it the handoff alone was thrilling.
The cassette was also invaluable in learning to play songs. You could stop, rewind, and restart the song at any point until you figured out what that minor chord the band was playing in the chorus, or what the singer was saying. All the tape players had a pause button that helped immensely in these endeavors.
Because a cassette had two sides like a vinyl record it retained the integrity of the LP experience. Unlike eight-track tapes that would divide an album into four sections which meant that sometimes the track would change in the middle of a song. (I’m looking at you “It Doesn’t Matter” from Stephen Stills' Manassas album. For the record, it does matter.)
Growing up, I made my own share of mixtapes as well, gathering up the best cuts from my record album collection.
The first multitrack recording deck I bought used high bias tapes. I was able to record four separate tracks on the thin dark brown tape strips. One track was on the right stereo track, another on the left track, and then two other stereo tracks on the flip side. You could only play it on one side unless you liked to hear discordant music. Despite the extremely narrow tape width, the sound quality wasn’t bad.
To this day I have dozens of cassette albums of my favorite artists. They still have that great analog sound. I even made a limited run of my own album “Why So Serious” on homemade cassettes.
Ottens went on to help develop the Compact Disc (CD) which pretty much edged tapes out of the market. But I'll always be indebted to him for providing a convenient way to record and listen to my music.