Hack a Roland P-6 pocket sampler with its own amp and speaker

It’s a drum machine. It’s a sampler. It’s got a rechargeable battery. It’s got… some space inside the case. So hacker DIYDSP (Noah Vawter) added his own amp and speaker, modding the handheld with the self-contained speaker Roland left out.

I’m surprised more people haven’t picked up on this, but – I expect if it’s here, Roland will hear about it! And yeah, you could absolutely break your P-6 by doing this. But fear makes hacking exciting, right? And even if you don’t want to do this, there’s a ton of information on this kind of mod and how to think about the amplification task. Watch:

I love this. I love the amount of detail and care. I love that it means you can jam anywhere with just the pocket device. And I love the really long description Noah added – see below.

Noah has a Patreon, too, and you can follow him on BlueSky, so that you don’t have Elon and his algorithms pushing notifications about complete nonsense every other day. (Ahem.)

https://bsky.app/profile/noahvawter.bsky.social

There’s a ton of stuff on his channel, too, including his own embedded platform for DSP, all worth checking out. But I’m going to leave this with him playing his wonderfully peculiar instrument of his own invention, the Brooklyn Eel. (That is actually the name of the instrument, not the song – the song is “ABCDEFU.”)

And more on the mod:

I’m crazy about portable instruments

I like to make hacks and experiment with extreme portability. This one is very practical and moderate difficulty. It requires some precision to pull off…

…But the rewards are quite worth it. It lets you walk around with your portable drum machine that literally fits in your coat pocket. You can also practice, tap out beats as soon as they come to mind, show off beats to your friends, etc. And you won’t even need headphones to listen to the tracks on your P-6, because it now how its own speaker and amplifier built in!

Why I chose the P-6:

As I said, I have made a small number of this type of modification to synthesizer equipment over the years. I even once hacked a mini MIDI keyboard into my Elektron SID Station at one point, but that’s another story.

The Roland Aira P-6 is quite a nice little drum machine with many great features… You can fill it up with your 8 favorite drum kits and use its decent step sequencer and overdub recording to make beats, rhythms, and even simple basslines. There are even envelopes you can place on the sample playback. It’s a little like having a rack of Ensoniq Mirages… I can’t say enough good things about it…

..but it had no built in speaker until now… Now that I have hacked one in, I can show you how. So let’s roll up our sleeves and follow along:

Overview of each section:
Basic components: small speaker, small amplifier, power switch, 2x side tape
Figuring out if there’s enough space for the hardware
Connecting the P6 Drum Machine’s output jack to the new amplifier input.
Finding where to attach the amplifier power to the main PCB
Adding resistors to combine the Left and Right into one channel
Testing the electronic circuit for the first time

Mechanical modifications
Dremel tool and 3/32″ or 7/64″ bit drill and endmill.
Or other means to precisely remove chunks of plastic

Dremel out a profile for the Amplifier Power Switch
Mount Amplifier Power Switch on the rear panel
3/32″, 7/64″ would probably be better for 4-40 hardware
Mill out the Switch profile with an endmill in a Dremel Tool
yes you remember my Dremel Fix-It video –
Remember to charge your battery

Mill out the Speaker Grill ** This is a really fun and creative part!
You can mill out any interesting shape you like. I did a classic checkerboard pattern with a rounded square outline, almost like some sound equipment from the 1980s.

Hearing it through the new Speaker Grill for the first time.
Reassembling the screws in the back and:
We’re done and ready to rock!
11:20 mini-jam through the new speaker

Thank you to my patrons at / diydsp for helping pay for the materials and the shipping for some of the parts in this demonstration hack.
I generally build electronic instruments following the “as-portable-as-a-guitar” philosophy. But when I see an affordable, good-sounding instrument that’s worth learning to play, as I found in the Roland P-6, and all it needed was a little speaker to be an fund, practical, portable-as-a-guitar instrument, it became a dream, one bordering obsession, for weeks. I slowly and methodically, chose the components, ordered them with cheap shipping to save $, and examined the insides of the P-6 in the meantime. Then one day,
the time came when I had a good 4-6 hours of consecutive time to perform the hack and film it.

It went pretty smoothly honestly. It wasn’t one of those “panic at 12:00 midnight” projects, fortunately 🙂 I was surprised at some of the things, though. For example, Combining the two stereo channels one mono out for the new built-in amplifier completely slipped my mind. I guess I was sure some kind of resistor mixer could be made. I made an educated guess about the resistor values, a compromise between pulling-down the amplifier’s input impedance, and getting the maximum output from it. I settled on 50k Ohms. I would guess guess that values from 10k to 200k would work well, too 🙂

If you like the video, please remember you can like it to see more videos from crazy music hackers like me, subscribe if you want to increase the probability of my next sweet hack showing up in your feed. But the best way to see my vids is on Patreon at / diydsp Everything shows up there waayyy before youtube, and plenty of stuff doesn’t make it to youtube, because the algorithm can be finicky if I make a few fun, short and personal vids instead of only blockbusters 🙂

Now build this and make some music 😉
-Noah

Bonus – I think because Facebook is stalking me – here’s an unrelated mod of Roland gear. Well, it is Roland, and it does involve the color yellow: