playskool drum machine, one-oh-one ed.

This wonderful little number was a $1.99 find at a local thrift store. The drum pads are rubber and conducive to some good old-fashioned hand drumming, so I figured if I couldn’t find any good bends, this would be a good gift to my two-year-old daughter. But alas, I did find a couple of really stable, fantastic sounding bends!

I’ve seen one other such instrument on the interwebs, with something like 7 mods and a black paint job. Super cool piece as well.

Even pre-bend, this piece is great, however. Each of the pads produce lo-fi drum sounds, there are four prerecorded beats, a fill button (the blue button with the full set). Best of all, the blue dial adjusts tempo, a mod I normally look for first. Thanks, Playskool:)

The switch on the far right adds extra hits/beats (except on the hi-hat), so it’s a sort of beat repeat/bpm delay effect. Yet that’s not all it does…when combined with the middle switch, it adds both extra hits/beats and adds white noise to the mix. This combo is great, in my opinion. The middle switch alone will add a filtering effect, and therefore you need to raise the volume when turning this effect on. It’s nice and lo-fi, crunchy, sort of a bitcrush effect. Finally, the psychoglitch on the upper-left portion of the unit. The switch, obviously, turns the effect on/off, and it is patched through a 50k pot, which adjusts the spacing/speed of the glitch. It works pretty well as a fill on a beat, as I attempted briefly in the video.

I also added a 1/4″ audio output, of course.

I really enjoyed this piece. It was really simple, both in terms of finding bends and mounting hardware. I didn’t run into any problems or crashes or stability problems. It’s simple and stable, which is sometimes hard for me to achieve in bending projects. I will certainly be on the lookout for more of these drum machines!

I didn’t snap a pic of bend points, but I’d be happy to crack it open and provide a diagram if anyone’s interested.