A devilishly cheap way to get good cassette tapes: Tape over the Bible! 

The reason why those tapes are in such good shape is the same reason why you bought the set so cheap: No one played them.

and on the 6th day; God created DOLBY

You can often find unused ex-police interview cassettes in the UK for about about a £1. They used to give them away free but you had to be taken in for questioning first.

Excellent presentation! The “miserable” joke was perfect. Back in high school, I recorded over record club cassettes that arrived when I neglected to decline that month’s featured album.

At 28 minutes 44 seconds, the shortest tape is still long enough to record both sides of the original Tubular Bells album.

Love that you spooled forward to 666 on the tape counter before bringing in the devil

This was probably how the teenager in a strict Christian household got a hold of his ACDC albums in the 80s

I love how much fun you had choosing the verses and such 😂

I was going to use this trick with a set of "Learn German" tapes meant for diplomats. However, my son got into them, and now he's learning a very domain-specific set of German :)

imagine use these bible tapes to record Iron Maiden's song "number of the beast", probably the tape deck will catch on fire

The tragedy happened when I was young. My dad erased a part of my favorite cassette! He was drunk and they had a party, and at the middle of my favorite song there was some silence and then you can hear him swearing and saying "...damn, wrong button!" :D

I showed this video to the pastor at my church and he said it’s not a sin to do this. He even did this himself a few times.

Screws holding the shell together are also a sign of quality. I used to open them and cut off most of the leader so the music starts as soon as you hit play. It was a cool effect.

My favourite quote from something is this “Don’t you read the Bible?” “Yea, im actually listening to it on a tape, don’t tell me how it ends.”

I was the church sound man in high school and college. We wiped extra sermon tapes all the time. We even had the big Radio Shack bulk eraser!

i love that "dinner with the diablo" was clearly meant to be a no-frills version of smooth by santana

Back in the '90s I bought the entire Bible on cassette to listen to on my portable Walkman cassette player while delivering papers. But they were so cheap they would often jam up the first time I played them. Then, someone told me to always fully fast forward, and then fully rewind each tape before playing them. It worked! Kudos to ME for the tip.

I think the bigger sin would be for these perfectly serviceable tapes (and their very fancy carrying case) to end up in landfill due to people not wanting 16 cassettes of the bible! Great video as always :D

I've never seen anything like this at a thrift store (maybe I go to the wrong thrift stores?). But now I kinda want one of these 16-tape Bibles on tape sets to store all my favourite ZX Spectrum games.

The new American bible, Made in Singapore. 🤣 Can't get more American than that.

I love the subtle joke of having the counter tick over 666 at the start of the "Diablo" recording!

The timing of this video is incredible, I saw FIVE cassette bibles at an estate sale today. I was briefly tempted to buy them, surely by a mischievous devil of some sort...

I used to do this "tape" trick as a kid. I had a lot of old pre-recorded tapes that I never listened to anymore, so I would record over them. In fact I still do that now! I'm sure my grandparents used to have a whole box set of bible tapes.

Back when I was a kid my girlfriends dad worked at a church that broadcasted its sermons over the radio. They'd record it on awesome studio quality Maxell cassette tapes. After they were done with them, he'd bring them home & let me have some of them. I still have them to this day! I even made new recordings on one! 👍🏻

Not even 19 cents per tape, that's what we call a bargain 👍

Man, the Apostle Paul really played a good saxophone to the Corinthians. Who knew?

Came for the blasphemy, stayed for the Johnny Cash electronic bible endorsement.

I don't know if taping over the Bible is a sin, but taping over Morse code instructional materials is a grade-A travesty. Loved all the little easter (lol) eggs in this vid Kev, thanks for going the extra mile ;)

5:05: Turns out old John can't tell a trumpet from an electric guitar.

Years ago, back in my Eastern European home, I found some pre-recorded tapes with university lectures on them. Specifically, communist criminal law. I took the greatest pleasure in recording over them some criminally degenerate rock and roll. Including my favorite local blues band, whose members had actually been prosecuted for playing "western music" back in those days.

I once bought a box full of cassettes with BASF tape stock cut to length from a duplication facility. What I found was that since they were made for high speed duplication, they had different magnetic properties than regular Type I tape and the high end would settle after recording, requiring experimentation with the bias current to find where it would give the best results. The short delay from the recording to the play head was insufficient to tell how much the tape settled. Even though the bias needed in the end was lower than for regular Type I tape, I did have to increase it from the level given by regular calibration. That's important to consider if using high speed tape stock with regular cassette decks and it's probably best to avoid on decks without manual bias control. Especially if using Dolby NR (especially Type C) as it will pump horribly on playback if the tape was not biased correctly.

I too have had pretty good results taping over old unwanted pre-recorded tapes. A lot of them used BASF tape or other brands that bias like a BASF.

You always seem to have a humorous spin to all of your videos. They are very enjoyable. I've been taping over pre-recorded cassettes for over 40 years and usually have good results, too. I just wish I had a nice deck like your Denon.

I actually recorded over angry fanatic Islamic lecture tapes. 🤭 I recorded pop music from the radio. The last thing they would have wanted us to be attached to. They handed them over for free at the mosque to my dad and I would use them instead of blanks.

Some Bible tapes have the length on the top or on the leader as the use bulk duplicator tapes. Many still had the tabs left in. One time I got really lucky as they all were 120 minute Maxell Communicator Series cassettes.

A new channel subscriber / retrospective tomcat 😺 from Vantaa, Finland 🇫🇮. I still listen to the old rock and metal music 🎵🎶 on the c-tapes, LP's and CD's 😺👍. And you may not believe this, but i also have the original hardwares of the Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 😺👍🕹️. Thank you 😸😺👍.

I just bought 115 blank 100 minutes chrome tapes from a church. 😁 Greetings from the Netherlands !

All of these tapes deserve 80's heavy metal 🤘

I have been doing this for years. Being in Idaho, I have picking up LDS book of Mormon which is usually on about 17 cassettes for $2-3. I use rare earth magnets to erase them.

Excellent! I actually did something similar with a few of these 12-cassette “Golden Oldies” box sets from the late eighties; because the sound quality of the various songs on those tapes was not great to begin with, I actually taped over them with the same songs with much better quality!

Sounds heavenly!

Waaaay back when I was very young and was unable to afford cassettes of any sort of quality I was very glad for my dad bringing home cassettes from Merryl Lynch (spelling). My dad was a banker and would get these cassettes distributed by ML giving parched-dry talks on how the markets were doing and such. These were my lifeline for media in the 70s lol. I highly recommend looking for these sorts of things as they can indeed save you a fortune.

Starting the Diablo recording at 666 ❤

I'm quite happy to have managed to get a nice pile of NOS TDK D series tapes, plus I have all my dad's old tapes from when he was going to Musicians Institute. I also have access to a near endless supply of country and classical music on tapes at any thrift store/goodwill/craigslist because I live in Montana and the older folk here only seemed to stop using cassettes because they've either passed, or because their truck with the tape player finally gave up the ghost. But taping over the bible (or other books) is quite an idea!

Imaging recording hard rock and heavy metal on a bible tape. Other than that, I too think it's a better idea to just grab some old tapes for a bargain and record over them. You won't believe how many chrome tapes you can find for cheap. Heck, sometimes you can come across gems you wouldn't even know about otherwise

Another fine score and good tip. Thanks young lad. Brilliant stuff!

This reminded me of when my uncle had a portable cassette player, and he was demonstrating it to us with some random cheap pre-recorded tape he bought, and he recorded a bit of his own voice over part of it! Some other people I was with were talking to him about the tape, but I couldn't remember much of what they said, though I know it happened back in 2007.

Put synth pop on them. Then you can say Jesus died for your Synths.

"Hi, this is Tony from Cassette Is Not Going To Bring Back Jesus". Thanks for this beautifully crafted video, Kevin. It ticks all my boxes, heathen or not.

I waited a video like that for years nice you rock Kevin thanks ! Quality video from one of my fav RU-vidr

I see what you did at 1:02: "But there's an ever cheaper way to amass a collection of cassette tapes..." I've used the tape-over trick to reuse unwanted spoken-word tapes many times. You got off easy with those tapes having paper labels. Newer tapes that have the labels printed directly onto the plastic aren't as easy to recycle, though a little bit of isopropyl alcohol usually does the trick.

I'm still laughing at the "miserable recordings"

Huh, 28 minutes 44 seconds per side on the shortest cassette... Gives me a delightfully devilish idea for what to tape over that one: Slayer's _Reign in Blood_ and/or Deicide's _Once upon the Cross_ would fit on it perfectly! 😁🤘 Either both sides recorded with the same album for a cool 'endlessly looping' tape when used with an auto reverse equipped deck, or one album on side A and the other on side B.👌

Years ago Jesus: The Movie was mailed to hundreds of thousands of houses, and I knew a postal worker who gave his friends huge stacks of them unopened to use as free blanks!

True story i had a huge set called user allusions that i recorded over. One day while walking i wanted to listen to one i pushed play walking by some people and it said "i really don't like you because you did that" then i stopped it i laughed so hard. Moral of the story. Make sure you play the correct side when using these

1:40 most likely since you found that in at the thrift store the person moved on to the other side. 😁 Reminds me, I found a forgotten stash of brand-new sealed cassette tapes I bought in the early 90's when I still used that Jurassic technology. I haven't used any cassettes for about 25+ years. Well, maybe it's time to dump em' on eBay. I still have stuff I recorded off the radio on cassette when I was a teen in the 80's. And yes, one of those cassettes is a TEAC Sound 52 with the little reels. 8:50 That's a *real* old school spreadsheet in all sense of the word there! 😉

The police used to give away free tapes in the uk if you were interviewed so we would go in for any crime they had and make a random statement to get a free tape

I once found a buch of English tution degree books, each one has a spelling cassette included. So I happily grabbed the tapes and left the books untouched. Recorded music over. Great feeling.

Does anyone know an ancient pagan temple that distributes their beliefs on quarter-inch double-coated Maxell reels? Much obliged...

another good one is the "learn a language" tape packs. they can have like 10 tapes and you can get them for a couple bucks.

The red stripes on the tape leader (as seen on the bottom tape at 6:50) looks very familliar to the leader TDK used for its C60 tapes. So it could be a TDK tape.

That is one of the most funny and informative at the same time videos you ever made. 😈🤓

There are a lot of local traditional and gospel music bands here in Newfoundland that put out tapes in the 90s and 2000s for the older crowd and couldn't sell them all. They tend to pile up at second hand stores, but their lengths may be shorter. I haven't tried them, but they may be good for recording short albums and the like.

that's what i've been doing over the years, making playlists/albums from cassette audiobook! they sound great most of the time

Suddenly those aliexpress tapes dont seem so overpriced anymore

Geeze, now all the bible tapes on eBay are gonna sky 🚀

What a brilliantly funny well edited Video…thanks

I love this idea. I’m blind I wonder if I can get my hands on old books on tape through American printing house, or the state.

That was some s̶a̶t̶a̶n̶i̶c̶ santanic music there.

I went to a record store that had financial books on tapes for few bucks! It had six tapes, and mostly used it to copy some of my vinyl recordings to tapes, because it’s some music I want to play on the go!

I bow down to you and your excellently timed jokes.

I'd love to see one of your amercian presidents swearing the oath of office with one of those cassette bibles

'The Good Book...on TAPE...oooh it's read by Larry King!' (It's always nice to be reminded of classic Simpsons!)

I got 4 garbage bags full of TDK SA-90s used once each for recording/mixdowns in an old TASCAM multitrack cassette recorder circa 1984...Are they worth anything? 🙃😉

My soul needed this video so badly right now. ❤

This is great. I've been using this hack for a while. I like using tapes from bands I don't care for, bought from thrift shops. Sometimes they were released on cr2 high biased! I wipe the print off using brasso polish. Works quite nicely!

I'm a roman catholic christian, and I see no problem at all to reuse those tapes for something else. The Bible still there in paper, and God ain't gonna be mad for something so simple as that. I'd do the same, mainly because English isn't my first language, Brazilian Portuguese is, and even being able to speak and listen to English at a decent level nowadays, it woudn't be the same if I was listening to the bible in my native language. So happy taping, Kevin! Thank you for making my lunches (and dinners, just now I'm eating) so much enjoyable with your videos! Lots of love from Brazil♥♥♥

nice tape deck! will have to be on look out for a similar one, finally getting me a lower end one and I now have finally got one to work to try to get!

As always I love your sense of humor

Certainly better than ending up in a landfill.

I once saw some iPods at my local Goodwill that were pre-loaded with the complete Bible. They looked like they were factory sealed from Apple. I guess you could do the same thing with those.

What would happen if you disabled or removed the erase head from your tape deck before re-recording the tapes? Would the two recordings merge? Could you add cool background music to the Bible readings?

2:07 I have a set in a slightly different case/label somewhere, but the narrator sounds VERY familiar. Does each tape begin with some cheezy music, and are there occasionally dramatized background sounds in the recording production? The book of Matthew has plenty of that on my tapes...

Blasphemer! I used the "tape" trick as a kid with my Fisher Price cassette recorder. I had two comedy characters named "Toot" and Toot Toot" Genius. Actually, my best work was a LEGO stop motion animation on VHS, it was a Star Wars parody called "Inhaler Wars". All the characters had asthma (because I used to have asthma)

Finally some good use of the bible

Another brilliant video, Ive been 'reusing' old audio books from the Uk, most are C60 and you can get a double for less than $1 for the two.... Still wrapped from the late 80's...

A lot of the stuff i'd like to record to cassette dont have physical media that I could hook it up to. Any advice for recording tapes from a computer source?

I had this cassette tape that had the new testament on it but I recorded over it. I had the talkboy from home alone and I was at my cousin's house with another cousin and we all recorded random stuff on it. Whatever they wanted. I still have the tape but some of the recordings got messed up. One day I will digitize all my old tapes with funny recordings on them and may share parts of them here.

Finally, I can make my Slayer and Metallica mix tapes off other tapes, vinyl, cds, mp3s, satellite radio, and FM radio.

I agree, I bought a bunch of church recording cassettes a long time ago and I reused them to record radio station shows that I really liked. The majority of them had the light blue leader tape and offered a really nice fidelity. I was using a Sony boombox to record them. If you're interested in analog tape recording this is a great recommendation. As a personal opinion what do you think is the best to do with these tapes when re recording? To erase all the audio already stored or record onto an existing recording? Of course the deck will be erasing the existing recording but what do you think is the best method to follow?

Good news on the morse code front, you no longer need code to get General or Extra in the US

Didn't they make blank cassette tape labels to print through a printer? If not, I'm sure there's a template somewhere. Great video as always- and good mixing between the Bible and music! It sounded like it should had been part of the song (Dinner with the Diablo).

I've got a good handful of sealed, unused Type II and Type IV Cassettes just from Value Village over the past year or so. usually they are packs of two and are priced for about 2 dollars.

"...And needing to erase someone's ** miserable recordings..." Oh, har har. Very funny.

I bought one of these as a joke for cheap a few years ago. Very informative video.

I wish Metallica had done this with their new album. I went through 3 cassettes before I gave up and bought the CD, the tape stock they used had flaws all over it.

Rather clever idea. My local thrift store has a large collection of old books on tape that never sell; probably because an MP3 file is so much more convenient these days.

Please don't buy up all the audio books on tape. I'm a big fan of listening to them. Many of them not available on audible or similar

Gotta love that off-brand Santana track.

I use this brilliant idea to make my own mix tapes & use tapes from language teaching courses, Motivational preaching etc. They're widely available worldwide as a set of 6 to 12 cassettes.