# Can I turn my cassette recorder into a distortion pedal?



## NGroeneveld (Jan 23, 2011)

Over the holidays I hacked a couple of old cassette recorders and turned them into amps by wiring an input jack into the recording head. They overdrive like crazy! I was also looking at a schematic for an overdrive pedal and I got to thinking that a lot of the parts in the pedal were also in the tape recorder. I was thinking maybe I could pull the parts out of the tape deck to use in the pedal, but then I thought, why not just turn the tape deck into a pedal? What would happen if I just clip the speaker wires and put an output jack on that end? I'm sure just building the pedal from scratch would work a lot better, so consider this a theoretical question. I am a NOOB at electronics and I don't want to start any fires or blow my amp. I'd try it though if it wouldn't damage anything.

Thanks!!


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## jimihendrix (Jun 27, 2009)

Here's a video for converting a cheap cassette player into an amp....I'm sure you could use the headphone jack to go to an amp...

[video=youtube;w6pWlwsPD5Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6pWlwsPD5Y[/video]


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## bluzfish (Mar 12, 2011)

10CC used to do that in the early 70s on some songs.


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## Mooh (Mar 7, 2007)

My first good overdrives were two old Sunbeam tube reel-to-reel tape recorders. They already had 1/4" jacks in and out. Freaking awesome tone. One was my grandfather's and the other was my Dad's, but by the time I got them (early '70s) no one was interested in them, the world having embraced cassette technology. Wish I still had them.

Peace, Mooh.


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## bolero (Oct 11, 2006)

Keith Richards used to do that a lot. street fighting man was an acoustic gtr into a cranked little tape deck


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## NGroeneveld (Jan 23, 2011)

Mooh said:


> My first good overdrives were two old Sunbeam tube reel-to-reel tape recorders. They already had 1/4" jacks in and out. Freaking awesome tone. One was my grandfather's and the other was my Dad's, but by the time I got them (early '70s) no one was interested in them, the world having embraced cassette technology. Wish I still had them.
> 
> Peace, Mooh.



That's what I was thinking - cut off the speaker wires and attach a quarter inch jack - then run to my amp.


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## zontar (Oct 25, 2007)

I used to do it--had an old cassette deck, and went into the mic jack, cranked the record level and came out to my amp--sometimes played it through a stereo, but had to watch the volume so as not to hurt the speakers--so that wasn't done very much--plus it sounded better through the amp. (And I've heard of other issues playing through a stereo)


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Mooh said:


> My first good overdrives were two old Sunbeam tube reel-to-reel tape recorders. They already had 1/4" jacks in and out. Freaking awesome tone. One was my grandfather's and the other was my Dad's, but by the time I got them (early '70s) no one was interested in them, the world having embraced cassette technology. Wish I still had them.
> 
> Peace, Mooh.


My first overdrive pedal around 1970 or so was a tube reel-to-reel. I would plug the guitar into the mic input, and feed the line output to my amp. The guitar would overdrive the mic preamp, and the line out from the tape machine would overdrive my puny Symphonic amp. It sounded amazing...or rather, we _thought_ it sounded amazing. I have no way of knowing whether it was as great as we thought, since there are no recordings of it, and both the tape deck and amp are long gone 40 years ago.

Ritchie Blackmore was apparently doing something similar at the time, although he was using a solid-state mic preamp in an Akai tape deck, rather than a tube-based mic preamp.

The pivotal aspect, however, is that mic preamps always expect a signal much much lower in amplitude and impedance than a guitar. Feeding a guitar into a mic preamp, whether tube or solid-state, will result in both considerable clipping, and considerable loading.


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## Mooh (Mar 7, 2007)

mhammer said:


> My first overdrive pedal around 1970 or so was a tube reel-to-reel. I would plug the guitar into the mic input, and feed the line output to my amp. The guitar would overdrive the mic preamp, and the line out from the tape machine would overdrive my puny Symphonic amp. It sounded amazing...or rather, we _thought_ it sounded amazing. I have no way of knowing whether it was as great as we thought, since there are no recordings of it, and both the tape deck and amp are long gone 40 years ago.
> 
> Ritchie Blackmore was apparently doing something similar at the time, although he was using a solid-state mic preamp in an Akai tape deck, rather than a tube-based mic preamp.
> 
> The pivotal aspect, however, is that mic preamps always expect a signal much much lower in amplitude and impedance than a guitar. Feeding a guitar into a mic preamp, whether tube or solid-state, will result in both considerable clipping, and considerable loading.


That's pretty much what I did. Used the 1/4" mic input for the guitar, and bypassed the power amp. It took an incredible amount of trial and error as I remember. High school electrical stuff but I was still in high school. I started by simply using the tape machine as an amp, and I had an extension speaker, one of those completely open back things that were commonly used with film projectors then. It never did sound as sweet as my old Harmony tube amp ($0.25 at a church rummage sale) so that's what led me to use the tape machine as a preamp instaed...that and Guitar Player magazine that filled my head with ideas, and high school electrical that made me think I could actually make such stuff work...sometimes it did. Wish I'd kept all that old gear.

Aside: I also made my own tape echo with those machines, thanks to Dad teaching me how to splice tape. Later some friends and I attempted infinite sustain devices out of huge U-shaped speaker magnets and regular pickups. Access to an old theatre and cable TV company gear made us take our lives in our hands every weekend. We had a lot of fun with electromagnets, even if the experiments didn't work very well.

Peace, Mooh.


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## NGroeneveld (Jan 23, 2011)

NGroeneveld said:


> why not just turn the tape deck into a pedal? What would happen if I just clip the speaker wires and put an output jack on that end?


Okay - so that worked - results were not great but it was a fun experiment fooling around with the circuits - now I'm ready for a real pedal build!


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