You may remember the galaxy guitar from this post, and that it was completely fucked. Well, no more! I replaced the faulty transistor, so now it's REALLY loud, and added a couple of innovations -- I found that I could make an LED light up in response to sound by connecting it across the new transistor - so I wired that up and stuck it out the front of the galaxy guitar, my inspiration is at the top. . Now it can be wiggled around in front of the photoresistor, allowing for excellent expressive control. I also added a voltage control input that has some (limited) interactivity with the pitch control. It works extremely well with a piezodisk, and not much else. A wonderful effect (which, of course, I can't find now) involves a piezo I attached some wires to, then strummed the wires while playing the galaxy guitar, creating really warbly noise and junk sounds.
My first "real" electronics project, this is a Nic Collins design on a 74HC14 chip - 5 oscillators, 4 of which are available via knobs. I'm going to write a lot more about this later.
EDIT: This is 5 oscillators on a 74HC14 digital logic chip. Four of the knobs control individual oscillators --the 5th knob is interesting because it allows you to choose between two signal groups - one of which includes all the oscillators going, and one is just a few oscillators. It has a built in speaker, which is amplified from a 386 audio amplifier, and a 1/4" out. The fun thing is that the oscillators sort of cross-modulate each other, I assume because of limited power supply - they cannibalize each other's and ending up dirtying up the signal, which is great for me. I'm going to post some tracks that I've made with this box soon too.
These are my first two attempts at repackaging toys, both from over a year ago. I've gotten a little better at it (see the previous post on PINK BOX), but I really like the messy, science fair project-gone-wrong feel these things have to them. This one in the grey box was also my first experiment with building my own controllers - I tore open a calculator, traced lines on the circuit board myself to find pin connections, and used the buttons to control various functions on a toy guitar (notes, pitch, distortion, etc) that I found while bending it. An interesting result was that different button combinations would create very different levels of resistance, and would be completely different than pressing the buttons independently. Another interesting effect of this is that the calculator interface would allow certain buttons to be activated only when other ones were pressed down -- which I never really analyzed, making for a chaotic and interesting interface.
This second project was built into a small dumpstered typewriter case, and was an experiment to indulge my fetishization of patch bays, and using circuit bent voltage signals to process other toys. It's made from the insides of 4 independent toys - an Elmo toy, a "bomb box" that made explosion sounds, a telephone toy, and a steering wheel toy. The patch bay allows you to interconnect their signals, and wasn't a total success. I really wanted to have the audio output of different toys be the control voltage to modulate each other's pitches, in some sort of weird feedback loop that I could patch between. Unfortunately, an audio signal doesn't do the job very well -- if I were to rebuild this today, I would use LED/photoresistor (also known as vactrol) combos to patch between instead of just straight electricity, but I'm not going to go back and fix it now.
Also, I removed some of the sound samples from earlier posts because I only have 20MB on my wesleyan web world, if someone knows how to get better free file storage that's not RapidShare or the like, email me.
This is a typical black-blob type chip, but it seems to do some sort of fake synthesis, because connecting the pins results in many different alterations to notes, including modifying sustain, attack, volume, envelope shape (sort of), and of course, a pitch shift. I decided the best way to use this would be through body contacts, and it came out alright.
Apparently means something to some people - it's a toy I re-housed in a pink plastic box. The plastic was messy to drill through - it's the really hard kind that cracks extremely easily. The original toy was a microphone with "sound effects" such as people booing (represented in typical Engrish fashion by a ghost), applause, laughter, etc. I found an internal pitch shift, as well as another slightly different one accessed through a voltage drop.
I really like these toys that are built with overpowerful amplifiers, so the microphone feeds back when you bring it even slightly close to the speaker, which then slows down everything else the toy is doing by virtue of sheer mismanaged power usage.
In general, Yamahas don't offer the glitch capabilities of Casio keyboards, but as far as I can tell, their two speakers are amplified semi-separately - I assume this is done purely for signal strength, as the keyboard only normally plays in mono. The distortion bends I added to this keyboard - a bend I frequently use to make oscillator tones using the amplifier and surrounding components as the oscillator - sound very loudly in the right speaker, and just a little bit in the left. I wired separate 1/4" outputs for each speaker to take advantage of this situation. Unfortunately, I don't have a mixer with me, so you can't hear the result in this recording: http://boconnell.web.wesleyan.edu/yamaha.mp3
This keyboard is only a foot or so across, and the circuit board is about an inch square - not too many bending possibilities on a "black blob"-type one like this, so I just added a clock speed mod by unhooking the resistor that controlled it and wiring it in series with a pot. I added two body contacts that take advantage of human voltage to distort the signal a little bit, too. http://boconnell.web.wesleyan.edu/rainbowkeyboard.mp3
1.Build an Echorec. From what I can tell, this things never caught on but seem a lot, a lot cooler than the more popular and well-known Echoplex. I'm planning to build it onto an old turntable.
In addition to circuit bending, my main interest for the past couple years has been tape delay techniques, using reel-to-reel players. I currently have three reel-to-reel players - they are rather hard to find for cheap, but if you look around at thrift stores, junk lots, etc. you will eventually find some - I got two from my uncle, one for $10 from a school that was being abandoned and having a tag sale, another in a neglected back room of a junk shop in Middletown CT for $10, and one for free from the electronics dump at Wesleyan. The techniques have been around since the 60s, pioneered by a lot of people, but mainly Pauline Oliveros. In her excellent book Software for People, there's a great essay detailing many of the same tape delay techniques I figured out myself. Essential listening is Electronic Works 1965-1966, particularly the track Big Mother Is Watching You (preview here).
The most basic setup for tape delay involves two reel-to-reel players on the same reel of tape, with one set to record from a mic or whatever, one to play, and the play signal looped back to the record head.
In this most basic setup, the sound is simply delayed based on the length of tape between the heads. If you're running tape at 7.5 inches per second (ips), this can turn into a sizeable delay with the reel-to-reel players not too from each other.
The setup I currently use in performance, which works on the same basic principle as the basic setup just described, is considerably (unnecessarily?) more complicated.
I use 3 reel to reel players, usually with no input, but in a closed feedback system, analogous to mixer feedback like this:
or pedal chain feedback in the noise world. Sometimes I use a mic to yell into, which becomes completely unitelligible processed through my system. My basic interest in this system, however, is in the tape players themselves, and their internal sounds - hence the feedback loop. The guitar effects pedals give me additional possibilities, but the source sound comes from the reel to reels themselves - specifically, the cheap, discard-type reel-to-reels I use - no pro gear here.
Myspace of my band Jock Jams in which I use this setup (playing with a guy doing a lot of circuit bent stuff and more pedal complicated feedback loops than I use)
The 555 chip is a versatile oscillator with lots of practical applications for circuit benders. A lot of good information can be found on them that specifically pertains to benders. My idea in this (ultimately failed) project was to find a way to use 555s as glitch triggers. I had a Casio with pretty good glitch capacity, so I hooked up photoresistors with a range of maybe 300K-1M Ohm between the glitch points. I then breadboarded a couple of 555s to light up LEDs. LEDs were taped to photoresistors, and the setup was complete. Unfortunately, my next good idea destroyed the keyboard - injecting the 555's output signal directly onto the circuit board, which fried it surprisingly quickly. The glitch trigger setup, however, worked very well. I think it's simple enough and versatile enough for lots of people to be using it, but I haven't seen any projects like this. The best analogy I can give for how it worked was like scrolling through glitches - I put a pot on the frequency control of the 555, so it could go anywhere from 1 pulse/second to 500 or so per second. I would usually run it at 20 or so, listen to the tiny glitch snippets I heard, and then disable the photresistor with a switch to listen to the specific glitch I had heard. The other really great thing is that the instrument would essentially play itself - if I wanted to reset it, I just had to wait until it scrolled through enough dead glitches, then it would come back to life on its own.
No sound samples or pictures because I destroyed the keyboard. I am definitely going to implement this in the next thing I build with good glitch capacity.
My first true circuit bent signal processor – made from the insides of a small amplifier that uses the 386 IC. I put two amp bends onto the circuit board to make loud squeals, which interfere with whatever signal is being put in, and alter it in a lot of interesting ways. The only challenge with this is that the box needed a line-level signal to “tame” the squeals, so to speak – the device would just make noise by itself without a line-level input, which could be quite annoying. Fortunately, this worked pretty well with a microphone, so I just left it as is so it functions for both kinds of sources. I also housed the whole thing in a vintage walkie-talkie box, so I think it looks really great. Sound sample is recorded with an unbent SK-1 being played through it.
It's actually a lot easier than you might think. The organ I'm using in this video is a Bontempi electronic organ found discarded on the street in Middletown, CT. I opened the organ up, and found that all of its individual sound modules (i.e. tone generator for organ notes, rhythmic patterns, bass lines) were connected by bus wires in groups of either 4 or 8 that could be rewired and reattached, no soldering necessary. The tremolo you hear is controlled by a foot pedal I attached to a trimmer inside the organ that can range the notes from pure square wave to insane, unrecognizable tremolos. I’m just the organ repair guy for some monsters who have a band together, sometimes I wire the organ in different configurations, here’s another one where the organ is wired differently:
If you type in omnitards on youtube you can find lots more that are pretty much like this.
Not strictly circuit bent, but in the same category of stuff. This is the Zoli, a time machine I built for Bob Weisz's movie. I used an Arduino to get a little blinking light setup, and mounted it in a plastic pacemaker-size box.
Actually the first thing I’ve bent with significant glitching capabilities. All I did was find a glitch point, put two double-pole momentary switches on it, so a total of four glitch connects, and an amplifier bend that created lo-fi sounds in one direction and some cool screeching in the other one. The exciting thing about the Magical Light keyboard was that the little keys that lit up would glitch along with the sounds being produced, so really strange light combinations could be obtained that played along with the glitches, which I haven’t seen on anyone else’s bent stuff. Here's a sort of futuree musical video I made of it:
My first bending project, just two value-mismatched pots that controlled clock speed on a children’s toy guitar. It got smashed during too many concerts, and eventually one of its transistors burned out, which I only semi-successfully replaced. I later replaced the pots with a photoresistor before I really knew what I was doing, which worked even worse than it did before. Here's a little bit of it (midway through)
There's also a nice part in the middle of the song "Hollywood" on my old myspace ,
This is the second thing I ever bent, before I really knew what I was doing. See my post on Jungle Gears to get an idea of this keyboard. I used a dumpstered classic Apple joystick as a control device for two loud squeals which chopped up the keyboard signal really really nicely. This picture was from a weird day where this happened too:
A dumpstered ambient sound generator, probably from some old guy who died at the nursing home across from where I live. It had four samples – rainforest, ocean, forest, and heartbeat (just a really crunchy low thump – didn’t sound much like a heartbeat at all!) The circuit board was small and frustrating – not much to do with it, so I resorted to my basic Jungle Gear bends – clock speed alteration via a pot, and two awesome oscillator tones via two more pots. The result was surprisingly good, considering that I only had the four samples to work with. I really want to find pictures of this one, it looked really good, so I'll keep looking.
This keyboard was one of the ubiquitous clones of a circuit board I refer to as the Jungle Gear, since that’s the first model I encountered it on. The way to tell these keyboards is by the inclusion of the preset beat “New-New” (a typo of “New Age” that appears on about 70% of these). They all have the same voices (duophonic), 4 drum keys which double as animal sounds, and the ability to record a sequence of 60 or so notes and play back at any speed. Some have microphone jacks – a lot have a drilled hole in the keyboard housing for where a mic jack should go, but was never put in. These all fall into the “black blob” category of toys – the integrated circuit is encased in a plastic blob so you can’t identify it at all, which makes interesting bends difficult. For Jungle Gears, the only bends I’ve found are toy-amplifier based distortion and oscillator tones, and a clock speed bend which has a remarkably wide range without crashing the device. For this particular one, which I dubbed the Wolf Eyes keyboard, I added a photoresistor to control the clock speed, as well as a pot to control the same thing. Pretty basic bends, but with a reasonably cool result (click to listen). I can't find any pictures of this one, unfortunately.
A lucky thrift store find, this ordinary-looking children’s keyboard had SK-1-esque sampling capabilities! It had a tiny condenser mic built into its body, could record samples up to 10 seconds, and play them back at varying speeds and pitches a la SK-1. I did my usual clock-speed alteration on it, and found another interesting bend that added tremolo to all playback. I also installed a 1/4" input for line-level signals (making a line-level converter is really easy .) The interesting thing about the bends is that you could actually sample with the bends activated and then turn them off for playback, which left really strange noisy artifacts on the samples, which added a whole new functionality to the instrument as a distortion device. Click here for Sound.
I got this keyboard just at the point that I had run out of the right value of pots to use for the clock speed bend on this one, so I decided to try out a graphite resistor interface, as described in Nic Collin’s book Handmade Electronic Music, as well as other places. Doing it proved a little harder than I had imagined – I used two small tack nails as contact points, then drew graphite lines radiating out from them. The hardest part was getting electricity to travel between the tack nails and the graphite drawn on paper. I eventually ended up stripping some multistrand wire, soldering it onto the nails, spreading it out over a base of graphite, and hot-gluing the whole thing in place, which was messy but functional. The keyboard ended up sounding really good, and could be played either with an alligator clip or direct finger contact between the graphite areas. Here's a link to a Sample
