Boing Boing:

The Crudlabs Crudman is a new tape-based instrument consisting of a hacked cassette Walkman controlled by pressing notes on a keyboard. It might remind you of a Mellotron, another tape-based keyboard popular in the 60s and 70s, but Crudlabs points out that the Crudman “is not designed to replace a Mellotron and it does not sound like a Mellotron.”



“The Crudman can provide endless atonal sounscapes but has been designed specifically to be just accurate enough to function as a traditionally melodic musical instrument. You can record anything onto a tape, so if you’re a fan of the sound and idiosyncrasies of tape, the possibilities are pretty much endless.”

WANT. This is pretty great, though having multiple units (at $375 a pop) for polyphony seems to be an expensive requirement for those Boards Of Canada-ish pads. I’m quite curious just how this works so I plan on digging into the documentation found here. And the product’s main site has more video of the Crudman in action. If you can’t afford this lo-fi sweetness, then perhaps you could just pepper your samples with Goldbaby’s Dirt and Layers pack. (My teenage self – who regularly lost sleep over an inability to completely remove tape hiss in his four track demos – is giving me the stink eye.)