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circuit bent kawai r-50e drum machine!
StoreTags: circuit bent, kawai, drum machine, r50
Author: lilt on December 06 2006 Viewed 3906 times. 9 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
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finally ive bothered to get off my ass and use my girlfriends digital camera to take some pics so i can do a bit of a write up on this machine...
i saw it for sale on a local auction website so i googled it and found that it was relatively easy and effectively circuitbent (sorry cant find the links that i used)
and it turns out that it was!
when opened up and looking at it front on there is an IC (screen printed with "KAWAI MN234000KAB JAPAN 842B2) on the lower right hand side with 20 pins on each side
nearly every single connection you make between these pins will produce a well worthy sound effect...
there are two (if i remember rightly) pins that will crash the machine when touched with any other pin and ive also found turning on particular sequences or too many bends will also crash the thing...
in this machine are some severe distortions (one sounding like hi pass dist, the other a general dist), heaps of ring modulations, some filters, some gain boosting band pass filters and then several glitches. some of the glitches turn everything into drum rolls (teh aphex beatz!!!@~12`) and some will change the sounds to other sounds, usually changing them to the orchestral hits or timpani sounds.
during its construction i realised that there were simply too many bends to just put a patch bay on the thing...and i also like the idea of having dedicated switches on a box with a nice long cord so that i can rock out and do 'guitar solos' with it...
so ive connected up two printer ports on the front of the drum machine to ribbon cables connected to the IC. then some ribbon cables connect to the switch box.
the switch box is an old printer interface selector (the Tandy printer interface selector 3!) which already had printer ports on the back of the little box...
the printer ports in the switch box were already on a pcb so i connected the switches to the pcb to allow myself some more room to connect the wires (soldering to pins is fucking arduous work!)
here are some pics of the machine and switch box:
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*edit* AUDIO NOW ADDED!!!
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Comments
12/06/06
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mookid
audio or STFU
12/06/06
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lilt
haha...i knew that was coming!
i can send you a cassete?
12/06/06
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Tenine
Nice work 
Bring the noise or STFU! Do it!
12/06/06
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mookid
I haven't had a cassette-player since last century!
damn, it looks exciting!
12/06/06
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Tenine
Get guitar strap pins for the switch box.
12/06/06
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lilt
okay...audio now up
i had to record it with my portable mp3 player...so the sound is pretty crap
the first two bars are the original sound (pattern 88...my favourite preset ever!!!)
i have quote a penchant for all things nasty and distorted...so the switches i chose to connect were on that end of the scale
however the potential of this drum machine means that the switches that could be connected could make it sound very very nice
i love the idea of getting a strap for it tenine!
ive got heaps of ribbon cable sitting around to make ultra long cables for it
12/06/06
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Tenine
Cool! I'd love to hear some of the softer sounds as well if you get the chance and at a slower tempo,
and break out some slower-than-time doom beats too please
Are you just using switches or patch bays, or do you have pots too?
Do you think you could yuse the drum output signal to modulate some of the bends?
12/06/06
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lilt
slower? softer?
these words elude me sorry
haha
will get on to doing it later tonight
in the picture of the switch box you will see:
top row, switches - ring mods
second row, pots - left four pots = ring mod/distortions , right four pots = distortion/filters
third row, switches - distortion/filter/ring mods
bottom row, switches - loop and instrument glitches
you could definately use the out signal to modulate the bends, many of them work gradually when contennected to pots but then i would have to check out voltages and put in resistors etc. to get it working...and i really cbf
im sure you could use all the glitch points connected to the audio out (there are a right, left, individual and headphone outs to work with) in order to get some evolving sounds coming out of it
12/07/06
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SenorFrio
Those sounds drill my face! Great work!
12/07/06
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RRine
I used to have a kawai r-50. i loved those hits! I recently dumped samples from it into my machinedrum-uw. CliCK-BRASHHH!
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