Experiments with the 555 IC

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.  

Noise Box

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.

Electronic Organ aka TARD ORGAN

How does a dorky organ like this:





Get turned into this:



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.

The Zoli

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.

Casio ML-1 Magical Light

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:

Galaxy Guitar

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 ,

Original Jungle Gear

Original Jungle Gear Keyboard

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:

Dream Machine ambient noise generator

Dream Machine

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.

Jungle Gear Clone

Jungle Gear Clone

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.  

Fun Years SK-1 style keyboard

Fun Years Keyboard

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.

Jungle Gear clone II – High Frequency

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