Bleep Labs has released the Bleep Drum – a $60 DIY drum machine kit.
The Bleep Drum is an Arduino based ‘lo-fi rad-fi drum machine’, designed by Dr. Bleep. It’s designed to be a standalone device, but has a step input for the sequencer and individual trigger inputs available on the board.
Here’s a demo of the Bleep Drum in action:
Features:
- Four sounds, two with pitch control
- Four selectable sequences
- Record patterns just by playing them
- Tap tempo
- Reverse mode
- Hyper Noise 30XX mode
- Stereo 1/8″ output
Bleep Labs also has plans to sell the Bleep Drum pre-built. See the Bleep Labs site for details.
Can’t decide if cool or not…thoughts?
What does that matter?
It is cool. If there is a need to feed Recycles with new loops this would be the coolest and cheapest way to do it. Or you can do it live of course…
The Dam Drum 2 or this? Hmmm….
Maybe now people will stop destroying vintage drum machines for lo-fi grinding noises.
I wish it had MIDI, even just for sync. It would have cost an extra couple of bucks in parts and made it much easier to integrate with my rig.
dude, you can add midi. You only need some good hacking skills.
Uh. Seriously? Not many musicians have the programming chops to add a MIDI stack to an ATmega chip.
I agree
I asked about MIDI and the guy said ” its an easy hack”
if its so easy why didnt he
A: put it in already 🙂
B: have a how to or a file to download
Midi would have added a lot of size and a few more buttons. I wanted to keep this simple and cheap.
Eventually we will release an add on and upgraded chip that will enable MIDI and have trigger jacks. Rater than keep fiddling and adding options with it forever, though, I though I should release it like this.
That’s what’s stopping me from buying it. At least have a spot on the board where you could easily do it yourself:)
This is definitely nice but I am saving for this http://www.sonic-potions.de/
Thanks for the pointer- sounds great!
That’s much better. I don’t care if it’s 60$ or 600$ if a drum machine is just a one trick pony that cannot be tweaked, tuned, played with [knobs!! lots! :)], nor controlled over MIDI. I could also use separate outputs, at least 4. Cheap is not necessarily useful. Sorry.
I wonder if you can trigger it from an eurorack modular…
It seems possible : from their site, there is an extension port on the side where you can wire triggers for each pad. I ordered one to try it.
i like the idea of putting this behind a Euro panel!
Wow, just wow. There you have a DIY thingie and people complain that you’d need skills to modify the design. You know what DIY stands for, dou you? It’s precisely about being able to get into a given design (or come up with one yourself) and build something that suits your needs. Need MIDI? Well, add two resistors, a DIN jack and a few lines of code. If you don’t have the skills to do that you can either take this as an oppurtunity to learn something or get a machine that already does most or all of what you want. I guess the proliferation of nice DIY kits is to blame for some people’s shoddy attitude. And just because something is easy doesn’t mean you have to do it. The easy bits (like adding basic MIDI support and what have you) are boring and any true hacker will rather do fun stuff instead.
“I guess the proliferation of nice DIY kits is to blame for some people’s shoddy attitude.”
Lucky that people like you are there to help with a smile.
dude if you cant take the heat, then get out of the kitchen – your critical attitude is no better than anyone elses critical attitude
complaining about people complaining just makes you look like a whiny hypocrite, at best
Based on your definition of DIY why wouldn’t you just build your own from scratch and skip the whole exercise of reworking someone else’s design? No need to get chipy about it. Vote with you hard earned money, works every time!
I made a Bleep Lab kit before and it was great. Instructions were clear, and the gizmo made cool sounds. Half the fun is building it.
This seems like a fun lil project.
What a great sounding and simple drum machine kit. Looking forward to building it!
I can’t understand why anyone would try to use that for anything. I’m an experimental type myself, but there’s so much rhythm machines, better than this, you can buy off e-bay, not to mention VSTi ones. Just why the hassle? If it was a multi-channel RM with some parameters you can tweak, then I would be excited. A lot.