Portable Tape Player Distortion


Here is a distortion "pedal" (not really a pedal) made out of a portable tape player, housed in an old rusty Wenger watch box. The sound it makes comes in 2 flavors: nasty and nasty, selectable with the switch on the left, which activates a bend on the walkman circuit (the only one I found that made the sound different enough to merit a switch.) The switch on the right is the power, left is on, center is off, right is momentarily on, I added this because you can get some real neat effects by turning the unit on and off quickly, the distortion sort of fades out instead of just cutting off.

These are very easy to make, just replace the tape head of the walkman with an input jack of your choice and you're done. You'll probably want to change the 1/8" out to a 1/4" out, add a on/off or bypass of some sort, but you dont really have to. You can also do a lot more than I did with mine, look here for more ideas.

Pictures:
pic 1
pic 2

Sound samples:
Coming soon



Back to Circuit Bent Things
-or-
Back to Home