Hip Hop Tape Op Douglas DiFranco and Steven Stein had years of experience in the advertising industry when they set to work on a remix for a Tommy Boy Records contest in 1983. Following in the line of Tony Schwartz, and fully aware of past precedent, DiFranco and Stein used their genius of media manipulation to propel their musical masterpiece. Like Buchanan and Goodman, they made a sound montage of snippets of recorded sound from (mostly copyrighted) commercial recordings. Stein and DiFranco updated Buchanan and Goodman's rock formula with hip hop while keeping the same groundbreaking legality-be-damned ethos of The Flying Saucer records. Submitting their Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix to the Tommy Boy contest as Double Dee and Steinski, they captured the live feel of a hip hop mix at the tape editing desk and won the prize. They surpassed Buchanan and Goodman with a more tightly packed sound montage of hard hitting and rhythmic material. Cueing and covering the transitions from one funky break to the next were vocal snippets striking cultural chords in the audience. As much as The Flying Saucer records can be seen as a reaction to Cage's Landscape No 4 and William's Mix, Stein and DiFranco's work can be seen as bringing the work of esoteric tape musicians of the 60s and 70s down to earth. Combining DiFranco's artistry at the editing desk and Stein's paranormal sense for musical montage, they emulated and exceeded live djs at clubs like The Roxy and on radio stations like KISS FM. Stein and DiFranco achieved on tape what was and still is largely impossible using vinyl records. This prompted a number of young turntable artists to strive for that level of intricasy in their work, pushing the art of record spinning to new limits. While the digital sampler was still outside the budget of most musicians at the time, Lesson 1 predicted the feel of the new digital instrument in hip hop compositions. Their initial tape experiments revealed some of the standard formulas for the digital alchemy that would follow. DiFranco and Stein continue to collaborate in the studio and in live sets.