Tape is still one of the most musical ways to break sound, and here you get to do it with voltage control and your fingertips. This compact microcassette looper turns a humble dictaphone mechanism into a fully playable, bi-directional tape instrument for your Eurorack system, purpose-built for lofi loops, drones, and textural noise.
The Lofi uTape Scrubber is a sound-on-sound microtape cassette looper with a CV-controlled bipolar motor, letting you scrub, reverse, and pitch your loops from -5 V to +5 V control signals. Its single tape head handles both record and playback, with a front-panel switch so you can flip between modes while the tape is still moving, and the input signal is mixed 1:1 with the tape replay when in playback. A pitch knob sets tape speed, a direction/range knob selects forward or reverse and overall pitch span, and a pitch CV attenuverter shapes how your sequencers, LFOs, and other modulation sources push the tape around. With improved high-voltage, high-frequency bias inspired by high-end reel-to-reel circuits, recording quality is cleaner while still inviting saturation when you drive the input.
Creative destruction is built in. New material is recorded directly over the old as the loop passes the head, so depending on your input level, you can gently layer over existing textures or aggressively overwrite them. A dedicated momentary erase button engages the magnet erase head for punching gaps and sculpting rhythms directly on the tape. The audio output delivers a mix of live input and tape replay, making it easy to create evolving sound-on-sound beds, Mellotron-style CV-controlled melodies using microtape loops or full microcassettes, or wobbly vibrato by modulating tape speed down to around 100 ms. This final refined version adds muting circuits to reduce clicks when switching modes, a clear red/green mode LED, internal expander headers for future enhancements, and ships with a power cable, mounting hardware, a tape loop, and a replacement kit, ready to become the scruffy heart of your modular lofi rig.
