Over the years we’ve been entertained by an array of musical projects from [Look Mum No Computer], and his latest is no exception. It’s a tape delay, loop generator, and synth all in one. Confused? That’s what you get if you position a load of tape heads around a rotating disk with magnetic tape on its perimeter.
Taking a circular piece of inch-thick Perspex, he wraps a length of one inch tape round its perimeter. This is placed as though it were a turntable on a stepper motor with variable speed, and the tape heads are positioned around its edge. Each read head feeds its own preamp which in turn drives a mixer array, and there’s also a record head and an erase head. If you’ve ever played with tape loops you’ll immediately understand the potential for feedback and sequence generation to make interesting sounds. There’s a lot of nuance to the build, in designing the mount for the motor to stop the enclosure flexing, in using a gearbox for increased torque, and in balancing the disk.
The result is as much an effect as it is an instrument in its own right, particularly in its prototype phase when the read head was movable. We’re treated to a demo/performance, and we look forward to perhaps seeing this in person at some point. There’s a future video promised in which a fix should come for a click caused by the erase circuitry, and he’ll make a more compact enclosure for it.
The first image is beautiful! “He’ll male” what now?
Everything Sam does is worth a watch, especially since he shows himself building and fine-tuning everything he does.
I want to see it hooked up to the Furbies!
Suddenly makes me wonder if one could use old hard drive platters for this…
THAT is a good idea!
Not sure about HD platters as they need very specific heads and driving electronics that makes the analog approach difficult if not impossible, at least if one wants to preserve linearity, but ages ago I thought of making the exact same thing with floppy disks, whose material and magnetic layer should be compatible with decks heads and their circuitry that can go full analog.
Fripp