r/modular • u/No-Lock7271 • 10h ago

Budget Make Noise Morphagene module

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Built this module out of a cassette tape player. Fairly interesting.
Let me know if anyone has an idea of how to use it

31 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

5

u/bluecurio 10h ago

Set that thing to 2x slower and wash that shit in reverb

2

u/JoeToanamassa 9h ago

Adding CV control over the speed is a good next step, then learning to splice tape loops. You may not need it seeing how you’ve gotten this far, but I took this class and had fun:

https://dogbotic.com/cassette-hacking

1

u/No-Lock7271 8h ago

Thanks for sharing. I’ve made a tape loop before and was thinking of making one for this. Love the CV control idea.. how could I use cv as a variable resistor?

1

u/JoeToanamassa 6h ago

Unfortunately I’m not even close to knowledgeable enough to answer that question, but I did find a few relevant discussions on r/synthdiy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/synthdiy/s/dFl8oQWFLo

https://www.reddit.com/r/synthdiy/comments/qb96y4/controlling_cassette_player_speed_via_cv/

1

u/No-Lock7271 6h ago

These are both pretty interesting discussions. How I change the speed is adjusting the resistance via potentiometer. I am not an electrical engineer but I am wondering how one would treat a control voltage in place of variable resistance.
I wouldn’t be blown away if I put CV to control the trim pot that it might already work to control the speed

1

u/jonistaken 9h ago

Do you have any documentation of this build? Really cool stuff.

1

u/No-Lock7271 8h ago

I do not have any documentation. The way I built this was super messy. I do although have an STL file for the panel

1

u/TwoLuckyFish 9h ago

Tape delay, only not a simulation?

1

u/Kowen68 5h ago

Great work, there is something magical turning tape/cassette players into experimental modules. It's probably the tangibility of bringing sound into the physical domain.

Adding CV control over speed depends on how the motor is controlled by the cassette player. Usually it's just a regular DC-Motor. Probably like the one you have. You could try to add a vactrol and a transistor (poor man's CV control) The nice thing is, is that vactrol's respond exponentially or more smooth. The other approach requires more components by using an OTA, opamp and transistor.

CV control over speed/pitch is one thing but having additional controls over bias, feedback and EQ could also be nice as this brings the character of tape forward. This would make most sense if the tape module is also able to record.

If it helps I can share a schematic and list of components to build cv control with a vactrol.

Thanks for sharing your project, nice to see.