Cassetone

I saw Rich Bernett’s “The Sound of Machines” YouTube video where he came up with this thing called a Cassettone, I knew I had to make one. It is a variation on the Mellotron. Whereas the Mellotron has a separate piece of tape that plays a note for each key in the keyboard, this has one cassette player, and each key plays the tape at a different speed. The knobs are used to change the speed of the tape player. Then using a tape loop of a single knob, you can play different notes. I had a tape that was inside an old tape player I got at Goodwill at some point, so I used it for this experiment. I recorded a note from a keyboard for about a minute so I could play around with the notes. I didn’t have the patience to make a tape loop out of it. I added a jack so it could be played through an amp. It is supposed to disable the speaker when you plug in an audio cable. However, the jack was cheap garbage and once you plugged in a cable once, it never returned to the starting position, so I have an alligator clip holding it in place. I used an old record to make a plate for the knobs, and a jack plate for the 1/4″ jack.

Making this took a lot of time and effort, and in the end I was underwhelmed with the variation in sounds to be honest. It could be that I didn’t use the right note on the tape to begin with. However, I had a great time building it and visualizing where all the components would go.