Obsolete Mobile Phone/cellphone As Sample Player for Electronic Music.

This 'project' is so simple I'm really not sure whether it counts as an Instructable at all. : ) That said, I've run it past a few electronic music insiders and they all said it was a good idea, plus it's all about upcycling supposedly redundant electronic devices, which is always worth doing.

The premise: I often play electronic music sets using a portable rig and had been looking for a very basic sample playback unit that would allow me to drop individual sound effects and cryptic vocal snippets into a live mix in real time. If you listen to and/or make such music you'll know the kind of thing I mean.

I investigated various units from both mainstream and boutique manufacturers but none were ideal, being variously too bulky, too elaborate, too expensive, locked into highly specific sample formats, tiresome to load, having unhelpful file-naming conventions, being irritating to catalog(ue), having no display/an over-elaborate display, excessive menu-diving, external power requirements, unsatisfactory user interfaces etc. etc.

It seemed that the kind of device I was looking for simply didn't exist. An old iPod wouldn't have been suitable because I really wasn't interested in any kind of loading procedure that was more complicated than dragging and dropping standard .wav and .mp3 files onto a memory card. Ordinary .mp3 players generally have tiny displays that would be useless in live performance, while high-end models with large screens weren't worth the risk at any price simply because anything that relies on a touchscreen falls at the first fence: you get no second chance if you need to drop a sample at exactly the right moment, which also rules out small tablets. This problem is exacerbated if you have hardened fingertips from playing guitar.

At the same time I was grumbling to myself (and to everyone else) about how network upgrades were adding a huge number of otherwise perfectly functional phones to the ever-increasing global heap of e-waste. One example I had to hand was a Nokia Asha 201 that no longer worked on any available network in my native UK. It did, however, have a BlackBerry-style QWERTY keyboard, an externally accessible MicroSD card slot, a good screen with a bright, clear display, a Symbian-derived OS that was quick and efficient, a built-in music app that was a model of no-nonsense lucidity and (due to it not having a power-devouring touchscreen) a battery life of two weeks on standby. A lightbulb moment ensued: I actually already owned the device I needed!

Basically, all you need is a phone!

While you could try this with any model, I'll treat my Asha 201 as a you-can-take-it-from-here case study as its particular feature set is ideally suited to this purpose. To reiterate, these are...

1. A positive and nicely clicky physical keyboard.
2. A good-sized, bright screen that can display big, shouty fonts for good visibility onstage.
3. An easily-accessed MicroSD card slot.
4. A reasonably flexible music playback app.

Various other models have some (or maybe even all) of these attributes, so go with whatever you have or choose to purchase. Yes, really; it strikes me as sort of unhandy - and less than secure - to have your essential communications and life-management device doubling as a musical instrument, so given that obsolete phones of all stripes are sold on eBay for very low prices, if you don't have a suitable example stashed in a drawer I'd actually encourage you to buy one (make sure it comes with a suitable charger if you don't have one). Alternatively, just scavenge for one or ask around for a castoff.

You'll also need a MicroSD card and a suitable lead for connecting the phone's audio output to your mixer or whatever. Many phones will have four-contact (TRRS) 3.5mm jack sockets intended for connecting earphones with in-line microphones, but the majority also accept three-contact (TRS) audio out only jacks, simply bypassing the microphone connection. I understand that a few rare exceptions will short out the audio, but you'll know if that's happening and a suitable adapter can be bought on eBay for next to nothing.

One entirely optional, er, option is mounting the phone on some sort of stand. I've used a tilter designed for effects pedals, but a suitable phone stand could also serve, as could anything you choose to improvise.

There's really not much to tell, of course, but this being an Instructable I feel I should come up with at least a few instructions! There will be some variations according to your chosen model but the basic task list will be the same.

1. Having made sure your phone is charged, you may wish to clear out any superfluous apps, together with old images, messages, contacts and so on. Freeing up the space makes sense, but doing this also provides security if the phone goes missing.
2. If there's a disused SIM card in the phone, remove it and destroy it. Again, there's a security aspect to this, but it will also prevent the phone from wasting time trying to access it then telling you it can't. You'll probably just get a one-click-response message asking you whether you want to boot the phone up without a SIM, which of course you do.
3. Having prepared the phone, you can now switch it off while you load your memory card with samples. Many samplers and sample players are tiresomely specific about how you format and name samples and will often place restrictions on size, resolution and so on. However, a phone really doesn't care about any of this as it just regards your samples as a music library, so you can name the files as you wish, make them as big as you like (a 4GB card will hold over 4000 CD-quality 10-second samples or any equivalent permutation of quantity and length) and directly use any type of file the phone can work with.
4. You can then insert the card into the phone, switch it on and organise the samples to suit you. In the case of the 201 I've found that a good way of doing this is by treating each sample as a playlist, as this enables easy one-shot playback without unwanted next-track autoplay, while the list of playlists presents the entire set of samples in alphabetical order by title, making scrolling and cueing easy.

Now connect the phone to your setup and you're in business. Just navigate to your playlists, scroll to your chosen sample and hit 'PLAY'!

What you won't get when using a phone for sample playback are any of the bells and whistles offered by a dedicated device, so no effects, manipulation options, scaling, MIDI and so on. The idea is to use it for one-shot playback where basically what you load is what you hear. However, it's perfectly easy and great fun to just run the samples through external audio effects such as a Kaoss Pad, so do try that.

The use of phones in electronic music isn't new, of course. There are and have been plenty of iOS and Android music apps and softsynths and you may well own a current or obsolete device that has such software installed on it. However, there's something quite pleasing about re-purposing a supposedly written-off phone and its ordinary playback facility in this way, so do try it if the idea appeals. And apologies in advance if I've just driven up the price of a used Asha 201!