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Sunday Soldering: Akai Rhythm Wolf Drum Machine modifications

Sunday Soldering: Akai Rhythm Wolf Drum Machine modifications


Akai Rhythm wolf is a cheap analog drum machine. It has a nice old school lo-fi sound but unfortunately Akai left out some quite useful features from the standard setup. Today I decided to modify my unit to better suit my needs.

Here are the added mods:

  • Added a resistor to the outer legs of the 'Howl' pot to make the range more useful. By default it's pretty much a switch between clean and a completely destroyed signal. I used 33k. Probably even smaller value would do.
  • Added 3.5mm individual output jacks for all drums. The PCB has nicely marked spots where the individual signals are available but it's actually easier to take them from the volume potentiometers directly. The middle leg gives the signal after the potentiometer so volume also affects the individual outputs. It might have been a better idea to take it before the pot so that it would be possible to silence the signal from the main output by turning volume to zero. Even better would be to use a jack with a switch but that would require some more wiring.
  • Added a separate decay pot for open hihat. I have no idea why Akai didn't do this. They added a stereo potentiometer for the hihat decay to dump both open and closed hihat to same pot. It's just stupid. It's much more useful with 2 separate potentiometers!


Adding some wires. The blue-orange wire is for the open hihat decay pot and other wires are for individual outputs.

The open hihat decay mod. I cut the other legs from the orignal stereo potentiometer so it's now only affecting closed hihat. A linear 100k pot was added to the panel directly for the open hihat.

Individual outputs from volume pots.

Drilled some new holes to the enclosure for 3.5mm jacks and a potentiometer

Better than new!

I stole the modification ideas from these pages:

 http://www.goltstein.nl/Rhythm_Wolf_Modifications
https://carillonaudio.wordpress.com/2017/01/14/akai-rhythm-wolf-mods-hacks-circuit-bending/

Thank you very much!
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Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2020 at 10:22 AM

    Love the work <3 Would you be open to doing this for me? I can ship UPS and pay via paypal :)

    ReplyDelete

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