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.