READ: The JAM/Slickmode Master Tapes
This was almost a decade in the making. I had traded with slickmode back in the early 2000’s a few times and then it was a bit difficult to make trades over the years. We had messaged back and forth since late 2009 when I was trying to obtain copies of their video recordings. It never came to fruition. Fast forward to December 2019. JAM had asked me if I wanted the videos still and if I was able to grab them from him. Sadly, I was not living in SoCal anymore to make this happen right away. But I was going to San Diego for a wedding in February 2020. Thanks to my good friend Ralph, he picked me up at 5am and we made our way to LA to pick up the master tapes from JAM so we could be back before 10am. There was literally everything in these boxes. Almost 200 different tapes to look over and epic history of some great bands from 2002-2009 in there. Still being in school and some virus that made its rounds, it wasn’t until December of 2020 that I truly got started on these tapes.
Now here comes the part I wasn’t ready for… Video transferring. It’s not like audio transfers on cassette or DAT where it is pretty seamless and not a lot of troubleshooting. There is a LOT of troubleshooting with MiniDV tapes. I purchased a professional Sony deck from the SoCal PBS thinking it would play everything. Tapes would lose signal or skip throughout transfer and I would have to start over. Or they simply wouldn’t play well enough to transfer them. A lot of trial and error went into this. Thanks to Nick Serra from Live Nirvana, he coached me through what I really needed to do. That was to get the same deck that the video was recorded with. It became a task for me to look over eBay and find the same exact decks. Again, that was also difficult as the master tapes were not very detailed. I had to do multiple waybackmachine queries to find small information about the recorders used and figure a timeline what decks were used when. It was an obsession to make these perfect captures to digital. One thing I can tell you from these tapes is they might not have been stored properly. There was some build up in some of the tapes, most were recorded in LP mode which makes the MiniDV tapes breakdown even quicker and not to mention these tapes were 15+ years old. Over time, we can now tell that MiniDV tapes do not hold up well over time like other media. I worked tirelessly, every day coming home from work trying to get one tape or two transferred. But not every capture was great, you’d have to do multiple passes. I’d have to wait a week to get a new MiniDV camcorder to see if it would work. Only to find some didn’t work at all like the seller said. But I continued. By March 2021, I became so obsessive I’d wake up at 5 in the morning to transfer a tape prior to leaving for work. As I poured more funds into this project, it became more obsessive and manic that I simply had to say enough to the last few tapes that were certainly not salvageable. Almost 12 decks later, the tapes that I will post here are what I did manage to get. Which was about 98% of all the tapes. There may be some digital glitches here and there. But I am really proud to have preserved this collection. A lot of great recordings of Depeche Mode, U2, No Doubt, Linkin Park, Dave Gahan, Nine Inch Nails are in this.
I have a new respect for people who do video editing and do it well. It is very difficult and expensive hobby to do. I almost fell out of love of digitizing tapes over it. Thank you to JAM for entrusting me with all these master tapes. I hope to one day do their MD and DAT masters. It is a very impressive collection. Everything that I have transferred will be on my YouTube channel for preservation and your viewing pleasure.