Circuit Bending the Alesis SR-16

The Alesis SR-16 drum machine is a rewarding and easy target for circuit bending. Short different legs on the two chips ringed in blue (sample data ROMs) for some interesting sounds. Stay away from the corner pins - they're voltage supply and such. The science: you're performing a bit-munging across a specific range of the total sample resolution. However, the sample data isn't stored linearly, so it's actually affecting a different effective range according to how far you are through the sample playback.

Stay away from the chip circled in orange: it's a DAC which runs at higher voltages than the rest of the board, so you risk irretrievably damaging your machine if you fool around blindly connecting it up to things. Use a datasheet if you just have to play with it.

There's an excellent page here about bending the SR-16's older brother, the HR-16.

Things I plan to do:

• Write a decoder for the sample ROMs
• Maybe make a sample pack or two and a YouTube vid