What a lovely coincidence that tape, originally a recording medium, works beautifully for distortion and saturation. Whatever the reason, tape saturation is a popular effect. If you want subtle, pristine saturation, there are various meticulous models of high-quality studio equipment. That was one topic in our interview earlier this week with Universal Audio’s Dr. David Berners. (UA’s model is intended to model the entire multitrack tape deck, so quite a bit different.) There’s also, on a much gentler budget, a simple saturation effect in the US$79 Harrison Mixbus, intended more for the saturation behavior on main or submix buses than for replicating the tape equipment itself.

But sometimes pristine, high-fidelity tape equipment is the opposite of what you want. You want, instead, raunchy, destructive, dirty distortion. To me, like many others, that’s more valuable. And it can cost nearly nothing, if you’re willing to scrounge.

You don’t need any pricey equipment: just one unwanted tape deck and a CD-to-cassette adapter you almost certainly have buried in a drawer or closet.

And yes, as many have noted, this is really best considered an overdrive effect rather than tape saturation. (Tape player saturation? There is a faux cassette tape in it, at least. But it isn’t saturation created by the tape medium, so technically, it’s really just a clever overdrive distortion hack; I agree with commenters.)

Helsinki-based producer and musician Riku Annala shares in a video tutorial how this works.

He writes:

Really, it’s just a simple, almost stupid trick and I’m 99% sure that many others have realized it too, but I’ve never bumped into it anywhere. It seems at the moment that producers are trying to get away from the clean digital sound and there is a clear lo-fi trend going on. I’ve always been somehow fascinated with old c-cassette tapes (I’m a product of the 80′s) and I got myself an old tape deck for experimantation purposes. Here is the catch, I realized that by using one of those 3mm jack CD-to-tape adapters that are used in tape car stereo’s for plugging external players, you can route digital (or any) audio through the tape deck to color the audio in various different ways!

More on his blog:
Studio Experiment #1: Tape Saturation for Cheapskates [Recue]

Well worth checking out his music, too, whilst you’re there.

Variations on this trick? (I’m working on some hacks with a speed-variable portable tape player.) Other ideas? Make anything interesting this way? Let us know in comments.

Photos courtesy Recue.

Sometimes, DIY music boxes reach moments of mad genius. To me, they’re almost a kind of compositional conceptual art, executed as a set of circuitry and disguised as a piece of music gear. They assemble in series a set of solutions to design problems, but result in something – through the combination of invention and throwback, simplicity and absurdity – insane and wonderful.

At least that’s how I feel when I look at the Drumssette, the latest invention from musical instrument engineer Mike Walters. It’s a combination of the innards of a Tascam four-track cassette recorder with a push-button, gated sequencer, making a tape-based drum machine. (It makes sense coming from Mike Walters, who in the past demonstrated a Mellotron made from Sony Walkmans. The Drumssette is the drum machine equivalent of the earlier Melloman.)

The Drumssette, by Mike Walters

The trick to making a cassette tape into a drum machine is twofold: loop the drum sounds onto the tape itself, then route that audio output as the clock signal that drives the sequencer. With that done, you only have to push the buttons to turn the sounds on and off on the beats you want. There’s a bonus, too: what Walters calls the “focus” knob controls a delay line, allowing you to shift the position of the played-back sound forward or backward to control the sound’s attack.

In a way, it’s a reinvention of what the Tascam tape deck was – or, to look at from the opposite angle, a re-imagining of drum machines in a world in which digital recording was never invented. Its bright color scheme and throwback light-and-knob design underline the alternative-universe vision.

Tricks are treats

It’s the details of the path to this design solution that are daftly elegant.

For instance, there’s the “focus” knob, and the idea of using the delay line to control attacks:

Since the trigger for the sequencer clock is audio used in parallel with the actual sounds of the instrument, the triggered audio from each track might lose a bit of its attack when it gets to the output, especially if the sound has a slower attack. To solve this, I built a delay stage before the parallel audio gets to the sequencer. This audio does not go to the output of the Drumssette. Using a PT2399 digital delay chip, the parallel audio signal is treated with a simple, adjustable delay, with no feedback (repeat stages) and a clean output. Delaying the audio signal before it becomes the clock signal allows the the operator to apply an adjustable delay parameter to the sequencer, which allows the gating to scoot over and focus on the next drum sound on the tape before the loss of attack. This happens because the audio on the cassette is time constant, and the delayed signal is variable. The momentary unmuting (gating) is dictated by the delay signal. You can also focus between sounds, to create double time beats.

Then there’s the efficient, unexpected use of optocouplers and light sensitivity to produce a time-synced echo:

The analog method is different. When this mode is selected, the audio from the tape is passed through a photo-resistive circuit using optocouplers. Optocouplers are little capsules with photoresistors and LEDs inside. Photoresitors become less resistive with more light, so when the LED is on, they suddenly drop to a few ohms. When the LED is off, they go back to a couple mega ohms. The photo resistive material, Cadmium Sulfide, retains some light energy between stages. So, as opposed to a switch, the optocoupler fades in and out the signal much slower. This gives the sounds a synchronized echo (you can hear the next four or so drum steps on the tape as it fades out). This mode actually uses two optocouplers, and an inverter. These are wired in parallel to pass the signal when triggered, and then ground the signal when the gate is low. When the gate is low, the inverter changes the logic, switching optocoupler LED 1 on. When the gate is high, LED 1 turns off, and optocoupler LED 2 turns on. So, the signal is always passed or grounded in this configuration. If the signal is not grounded, there will be a little bit of signal bleeding to the output.

In Action

These videos really demonstrate that, aside from being a crazy design, the Drumssette is eminently usable as an electronic instrument. (It isn’t hard to imagine switching this on for a dancefloor, even.)

First, a look at how you can gate an external source using the sequencer for rhythmic external textures, in place of the “installed” drum sounds:

In this demo, I bypassed tracks 1 and 2 of the cassette by plugging in external sources – a Yamaha CS01 synth, and a turntable. The bass and snare come from the cassette tape. The rhythmic keyboard phrasing is completely controlled by the Drumssette. I was just holding notes down on the keyboard, and the states of the switches turned on and off the audio as the sequencer clocked. Same thing with the record on the other track.

Here’s a similar example, this time using a lovely sound from the Polymoog:

In this demo, I bypassed track one and two of the cassette tape audio, and replaced track one with the output of my Polymoog 280A on Vox Humana. The bass drum and snare sounds are from the cassette tape, which is also clocking the sequencer (snare sound, track 4). I’m simply holding down chords on the Polymoog, and the Drumssette is chopping them up according to Track One’s switch mapping on the front panel.

More Mystery Circuits Creations

The Drumssette is the self-proclaimed sequel to the earlier Melloman, a series of Walkmans connected to a keyboard for Mellotron-style cassette tape sampling. It’s now a five-year-old project, but no less stunning today as a benchmark of bizarre, fantastic design. The wonderful Analog Suicide (Tara Busch) took a tour of the Mellotron in 2008:

And these are just two among many, many creations. The full list:
Mystery Circuits

Retro Thing: Mike Walters Does It Again: Yamaha Keyboard + Heathkit = Mike-O-Wave

GetLoFi: Mike Walters’ Blue Boing (for a more compact creation)

WalkSX from Gijs on Vimeo.

As the Sony Walkman turns 30, many of the mobile cassette’s fans wax nostalgic. But it takes Gijs Gieskes to wire up a new Rube Goldberg-style musical instrument based on the Walkman’s simple tape playback.

Follow along carefully through the signal flow of this unusual instrument:

1. The Walkman has audio on the tape itself, sampled from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.

2. Because a compact cassette has two tracks (left and right, for stereo), one track is dedicated to the drums, another to the rim shot.

3. The rim shot track is fed as a mono audio input to an Arduino (the open-source microcontroller platform). The Arduino responds to the audio level, so each time a rim shot hit occurs, it ….

4. …sends a sequence event to the Gakken SX-150. That means that you can adjust the speed of the whole contraption by…

5. …adjusting the speed of the tape. (Bless you, analog playback!)

It takes Gijs to think that way somehow: put together, these elements are actually fairly simple, but strikingly effective. Fortunately, if this does inspire new ideas, Gijs has posted all his Arduino code, so you can check this out and try something yourself.

http://gieskes.nl/instruments/?file=walksx