MIDI-Controlled Cassette Player

Evgeny Kochetkov shared this demonstration of a custom MIDI-controlled cassette player.

The playback speed is controlled by the keyboard. The original pitch is A4 and pitches are transposed up or down from there, letting you use the tape recorder as a sort of monophonic Mellotron.

As a side note, the narration is computer generated by IBM’s Watson, using neural text-to-speech synthesis.

7 thoughts on “MIDI-Controlled Cassette Player

  1. another thing one can do is this:

    make a 5sec tape loop [not that hard but takes time at first]
    record some sustained strings to it [make sure you block the erase head before recording]

    the more expensive part though is having a pitch shifter pedal with expression in. like ehx pitch fork or one of those boss ones [to be honest no idea which one has exp in]

    so you take your audio out from your walkman or stereo into a pitch shifter pedal. have the effect be 100% wet. and then send pitch cv from your synth into the expression in of the pedal and play [or send midi into the synth or whatever]

    thats how i do it. mine is a modded boss ps-2 so the tracking is not perfect, but its wonky as fuck and i love it.

  2. eurorack this with a couple other features and make it quality and you got my money. a few others tried eurorack cassette deck but anything i received has been cheaply built and not worth the money.

  3. Now how about a tape player controlling a keyboard via midi? Or has this been done already? Would the vintage mellotron count if it was midi’d with In/Out? Interesting fun with this persons setup!!

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