Gadgetory

hi I am Jeremy and this is my invention this is the latest version of a vision that I have had for gosh 4 years now it's it's basically a a device that lets you scratch with audio tape what what makes it unique from other I know there are other people that describe with tape out there what makes it unique is that it's essentially it there are two different mechanisms of movement there's there's the physical movements of these moveable play heads up and down these strips of the strip of audiotape and then also there is the the physical movement of the tape itself which is controlled by a motor that's inside here and I have you know these controls that make make the tape move forward or backwards and by combining these are two different kinds of movements I I can really get a lot of you know fun fun stuff you know I can record to the tape and then scratch with it as I'm recording to the tape because the tape has multiple tracks I in like in this example I can have one scratch playlist recorded on one pair of tracks at another scratch playlist on another so here I've got parliament-funkadelic on one pair of tracks and then on the other pair of tracks I have you know a series of scratch samples the way I find is comfortable for me is it feels more natural to move from left to right with my right hand and then from right to left with my left hand so what I do is I I record one one playlist running in one direction and then the other running in the other direction so so then I can you know I can do this so these these play heads our play heads that I pulled from old reel-to-reel decks oh and by the way that yes that is a Safeway card that I I cut up and glued to the bottom of this the reason for that is because it's actually really important that beat the play head doesn't press down too hard on the tape because if it does then the motor will struggle because it's putting too much pressure on the tape so that that basically was the purpose of that was to make it a little bit higher so anyway yeah these are these are play heads that I pulled out of old reel-to-reel decks that I bought on eBay I spent a lot of money on ebay working on this project so this is the tape loop it loops under the board the motor the motor that's driving the loop is actually something that I I pulled out of an old an old printer I I was actually looking I was trying to figure out how to build the the pinch roller and the guy here at the Fablab Jordan he he suggested that I try just buying an old broken printer and taking it apart and and and it turned out to be perfect so this rocker right here makes it run forwards or backwards but if you're doing two headed scratching like I was talking about before obviously you can't have your hand on this so I build I built this foot pedal which is it's basically like a foot rocker and it you you know you press down the toe to make it run in this direction press down the heel to make it in that direction but anyway so you can see how it like I use the I use the foot pedal so I can I can do two headed stuff about a year and a half ago I built the first version that had an actual motorized tape transport which could actually record but it was still completely all handmade still really crude and that the video of that one ended up getting like over seven million views it was it was crazy a lot of people started reaching out to the web and so then somebody told me about Fablab this which is where I am now and this place is like this place was like made for me it was it's so perfect and I was ultimately by by coming here I was ultimately able to make a prototype that does almost everything I wanted in my it was it was almost a full realization of my original vision and it's been such amazing experience this is like this idea that I got years ago and I just I just couldn't get out of my head so I I just I had to do it