NewTapechild UDS-16
Soviet Drum Synthesizer
Kicks, snares, hats, toms and metallic percussion, synthesized in real time. Four models: two from the Lel UDS channel, one from the Formanta Rockton, one of our own.
Tapechild UDS-16
Soviet Drum SynthesizerThe machine is rare.The signature is yours.
Four drum-synth models built from two rare Soviet circuits — and one that is ours alone. No samples: every hit is synthesized as you play it.
Launch edition — $58 $29 · through August 30
VST3 · AU · StandalonemacOS + WindowsReal-time synthesis · no samples
Our instruments
One instrument so far. It took a year of circuits.
Tapechild ships one plugin at a time, and only when the hardware behind it is understood well enough to extend rather than imitate.
NewBefore anything else
Hear it first.
Full pieces in different tempos and moods. Every drum in them is generated by the engines, not replayed from a library.
From someone who shipped a record with it
“The controls are so comfortable and well laid out that everything fell into place within minutes. The instrument slotted perfectly into my aesthetic and became a powerful addition to my drum sections.”
S-Jay SopranoTechno producer · verified user
Where the sound comes from
Too strange for its era. Exactly right for yours.
When music becomes effortless, character becomes everything.
AI can generate endless tracks. It cannot replace the choices, accidents and obsessions that make music feel alive. Tapechild builds instruments for musicians who still want their fingerprints on every sound.
We study rare hardware, preserve its unstable clocks and nonlinear behaviour, then turn those ideas into original tools — bringing surprise, tension and soul back into modern production.
From hardware study to record.
- 01
Find the machine.
We look for instruments history skipped: obscure drum synths, odd tape systems and circuits most producers will never get to touch.
- 02
Study the architecture.
Documented synthesis principles inform an original real-time engine. A note is generated again every time you play it — never replayed from a sample.
- 03
Make it useful now.
The historical ideas become an original modern instrument. Tapechild finishers are added where they help the sound land in a record made today.
Circuits nobody reissued.
We go after instruments that were built once, in small numbers, and then left behind — read the schematics, measure what the parts actually do, and rebuild the behaviour as an engine rather than a recording.
What survives the trip is the awkward part: free-running clocks, drifting components, stages that misbehave under load. That is the part a sample cannot hold, and the reason these instruments still sound like nothing else.
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