There’s no definitive answer as to why Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music. Landing in 1975 between the pop albums Sally Can’t Dance and Coney Island Baby, the record spawned a mythology all its own: some read it as a deliberate purge of the pop audience his recent fame had won him, others read it as a “f**k you” engineered to break his RCA contract (though he tellingly stayed on the label). Reed himself denied all of it to the end, insisting it was a purely artistic act—born, in his words, out of love for guitar-driven feedback.1
Experimenting with SynthStamp
Enter the B500. We’d been experimenting with continuous sampling and a melody sequence playing underneath when the results tipped into something uncannily familiar: guitar pitched up and dragged back down, phrases folding over themselves, chaotic breaks ripping across the top. A cacophony, but not an aimless one—the same controlled-noise territory Reed staked out in 1975. The difference is in the making. He assembled his in the studio, guitars leaned into amps, tape sped up and slowed after the fact; ours arrived live, in a single take, direct to video with SynthStamp.
Here’s how we did it:
1. (Stereo) Audio Input
Start by configuring your audio input for mono (L + R) or stereo (L / R). Note that mono is configured by selecting the same source for both left and right channels, the signal is combined and optimized internally.
2. Memory Sequencing
Next, add a melody sequence, Normal mode will suffice. You can just start plunking away on the keyboard and by default quarter notes will populate. For something more interesting try changing the rhythmic pulse by adjusting the duration of groups of notes. In this case, pitch doesn’t matter as much because you’ll be playing back a live buffer of whatever you’re playing on guitar, and unless you plan on sticking to modal scales, dissonance is mostly unavoidable.
3. Continuous Sampling
And that brings us to Continuous Sampling. Though not a formal circuit bend, it falls within the same ideology. On the actual instrument you can set up a continuous trigger on the sampler, ideally corresponding to the full buffer duration of 1.4s, then add a custom input route for line level audio, and voilà. The bonus here is that not only does the keyboard play back realtime audio at different sample rates, you can combine this with a note sequence in memory for hands-free operation of the sampler. This allows focusing on live audio input, which for this purpose is the guitar. Playing along with the sampler as your audio gets drastically modified by a repeating note sequence is like having a conversation with yourself.
Needless to say, we think the results sound pretty close to Metal Machine Music. Or Pachinko.2 It’s time to explore your sonic potential.
1 Doran, John. “Lou Reed Interview: Metal Machine Music Revisited” The Quietus, October 28, 2013, https://thequietus.com/interviews/lou-reed-interview-metal-machine-music/. Accessed July 6th, 2026.
2 Pachinko In Your Head: Non-Linear Music. Blue Rahn Studio. Celestial Harmonies, 1998.
