Tutorial: Modified GE Cassette Player Pitch mod

Recently, a circuit-bender I look up to (Rich Burnett, aka The Sound of Machines) posted a really cool pedal-housed version of his Cassettone player mod made by another circuit bender on his Instagram feed. It looked pretty cool, so, of course, I went searching for it.

Within a few clicks, I found it and discovered that this maker was also selling Rich’s GE cassette player mod design (with less features) for a whopping $275 on Reverb.com. This is ridiculously overpriced, considering when I built three of them, for myself and two friends during the pandemic, it was pretty much an open source mod and freely available via Rich’s website (and still currently available via his YouTube channel.) Feel free to buy from dude if you want, but maybe save yourself $200+ and build one yourself.

Unfortunately, Rich has since let his domain expire and his website has vanished, which is how I found out about this mod. Luckily, the YouTube video and Google Drive links remain. With Rich’s permission, I have republished his original article, wiring schematic, drilling template and (updated) links to all the parts to make it easier to find via Google search and give it a little more visibility for folks getting into circuit bending, tape loops and cassette manipulation. This is an easy tutorial, and it also pretty much peeled back the curtain for me on how to get started modding tape players.

Why pay $275 when you can build this same modded cassette player for roughly $30-40USD or so?