Mystery Circuit’s “Drumsette”, a drum machine created from a Tascam 4 Track

I just found this crazy project from Mike Waters, who creates musical devices under the name “Mystery Circuits“. The Drumsette is an experimental drum machine built from an analog 4 track recorder. Basically, he assigned a repeating drum sound to each of the 4 available tracks, and created a gate to allow the user to play those sounds in a 16 step sequence. Crazy!

In a follow up video, Mike shows how the Drumsette can interact with other synthesizers as well. It’s not the most functional drum machine I could think of, but it’s certainly one of the most creative cassette tape hacks I’ve ever seen. It would be cool to see a similar set up that allowed the user to record incoming sounds and sequence them in real time. Like an analog tape delay effect that allowed you to select overwrite, sequence, and gate audio in real time.