Circuit Shaman Eurorack Expanders for the Music Thing Turing Machine

Bytes Expander

Update: looks like the above link is dead. The original link went to www.circuitshaman.com, which now goes to www.mysticcircuits.com.

"The Bytes loop length expander allows your Music Thing Turing Machine to create random loops and melodies in any musical time signature. Breaking free from the constraints of 8 and 16 steps, with the addition of the Bytes Expander your Turing Machine will be able to create loops of any length from 1 to 16 and alter that length with a control voltage. Say goodbye to Kraftwerk and hello to Coltrane.

With the use of two separate length controls it makes it easy to change the Turing Machine's time signature in a musically useful way. For example, set the lower control to '6' and the upper control to '12' and you can easily double-time your loop. The CV-selector switch and attenuverter allow for some control to tame incoming CV, setting the selector switch to either side makes it so that CV only affects one of the length controls, allowing for one length to be your "solo" mode and the other to be your "repetitive" mode.

The Bytes expander attaches to your Turing Machine through the "gates" expander port and via 2 jumper wires that connect to the original Turing Machine PCB. As such, the Turing Machine PCB requires a small amount of modification to be able to work with the Bytes Expander. What is for sale is both the expander itself and the service of upgrading your Turing Machine. Send me your unit and I will do all the hard work for you."


Bytes Turing Machine Loop Length expander explained
Published on Nov 25, 2014 Circuit Shaman

"Here I go through the basics of the Bytes expander and give a couple of examples of how I use it."


Below is the Music Thing Rainbow Turing Machine build from Circuit Shaman with Bytes next to it.

"The Rainbow Turing Machine (Originally by Tom Whitwell of Music thing) is a random voltage loop generator for Eurorack modular synthesizers. It is useful for creating melodies and modulation with a variable amount of randomness. This particular module comes with all of the available Turing Machine expanders and uses different colored LEDs in every way possible. The colored LEDs serve a practical purpose as well as an aesthetic one since the color of each bit is coordinated to the main display across all of the expanders."


Published on Apr 24, 2014 wind spirit

"Did you say that there isn't enough color in your modular? Well this modules uses just about every color of LED available (that would be safe for your eye.)"

Switches Expander

"SWITCHES is an expander that turns your Turing Machine into a sequential switch. Its set of 8 switches are summed together to 4 different outputs. Two switching methods are used: the top four "clean" switches use a high-precision switching chip and the bottom four "dirty" switches use vactrols for some extra character. Bi-directional switching is possible through use of an upcoming multi-purpose expander."

via Music Thing Modular

And finally the Vert expander.

"VERT is an 8-bit digital to analog converter with an internal clock, allowing a CV signal to be converted to 8 gates. Unipolar or bipolar input signals can be selected by a switch to cover the entire range of conversion. The internal oscillator has a range switch to select between audio and LFO range as well as an attenuator for the FM input. An expansion port on the back allows the Vert to connect to any Turing Machine expander, allowing new functionality to be added in the future. The onboard LEDs come in 8-color rainbow or a single color of your choosing. A trim pot accessible from the front panel allows the LEDs to be dimmed to the preferred level of brightness."

Note this is the first Circuit Shaman post.