Circuit Bending!

Is this a subset of earthbending?

>>1103093
Apparently it's where you dick around with electronics by shorting shit, adding components, and seeing what happens.

It's beyond me exactly what this would achieve.

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>>1102992
I built this thing a year ago and am working on a new version for the Moog circuit challenge right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJvaH2gRwj8

I've been fucking around with VCRs a lot too. You can circuit bend video as well as sound.

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Love it, although I'm no-where near that advanced.

what's the concept with the TV tube and tape?

I hit the thrifts today and came away with these, hitting my local electronics store tomorrow.

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>>1103121
It uses a light gun like before, but this time capable of supplying a sequence of values; light gun controlled drum machine.

I'm using an old portable TV and building it into a case. All the past Moog challenge winners built nice cases. There's also a rule that everything needs to be 9v battery powered so I can't use a regular TV that plugs into the wall.

I can bend walkmans to play the tapes at different speeds and other distortions controlled by the sequencer.

It's just a fake and gay meme, go troll /b/ instead

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>>1103190


nah pin head, go and circular saw your fingers off, at least it would cure your obsessive nose picking.

>>1104056
Haha, this dude is legit. That was fucking wicked

>>1102992
Is anyone into breaking children's toys by molesting their circuits with no working knowledge or real aim or purpose other than to make the noises more annoying?
If this is what you fill your time with then I pity you.
Go build a guitar pedal. You don't need to know anything about electronics for that either but you might actually learn something and you don't have to destroy a perfectly good children's toy.

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>>1103115
Got some more work done on this. I'm generating an NTSC signal and controlling a sequence of analog values with the zapper that go out to audio control.

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>>1104282
Any music people want to help me make up my mind on some things? How many steps is the right maximum for a drum machine? 8, 16, 24.. What's a good number of channels (sounds controlled at each step)?

I'm leaning towards 16 steps and 3 channels.

>>1104283
16 steps
4 channels at very least, 6 would be ideal.
basic kit: kick, snare, hi-hat open, hi-hat close, crash, cowbell.

>>1102992
Should Google custom speak and spells.

Some interesting shit but I never got much into it

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>>1102992
Been circuit bending since about 2002 here.

The problem with almost all toys is that they have the 'black blob' or black dot inside. If you're lucky, there will be one resistor inside that you can actually replace. So you end up replacing the resistor with a potentiometer, then you have a speed control, but that is literally all you can do.

If you find some really old toys or some really expensive toys then you may have some avaliable circuit to actually bend, but those toys are a diamond in the rough at thrift shops.

>>1104282
Sounds like you were in the Navy

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>>1104451
then you are just being lazy. Add two 1n4148 diodes parralel to the output with a 1k resister over it. This gives you controllable distortion.

>>1104451
Or add two piezo microphones with a spring between them for reverb.

There are only so much things you can do with black blobs. but there are almost infinite effects you can put over the output audio itself

I know this guy, Cristiano Rosa a.k.a Panetone. Googleeee

>>1104800
>>1104803
Groan. I guess. You're not really circuit bending at that point, you're just adding effects pedals to the output. I guess you're sort of right because, let's face it, to plug these instruments in to a mixer and actually use them at a show, you're going to have to add an amp on the output anyway. But why not just put an op amp on the output, send it to a 1/4" jack, then plug it in to a decent distortion or reverb effect?

I'm of the old school philosophy that a real circuit bender will make changes to the circuit, but should be able to turn all of the switches off and the toy should behave exactly as it did before it was bent. Only an amateur makes irreversible changes. You see this in the speak and spells a lot where people have swapped out one fixed value resistor with another fixed value resistor or whatever.

The bottom line is that to make a meaningful change to something with a black dot, you're going to have to dig in to the epoxy and make a permanent, irreversible change. First off, that would be a miracle, and second it would be irreversible. Not really my style of bending.

>>1104877
these changes are all reversible hence the potentiometer. turn it left original sound turn it right add effect.

And the reason for adding the effects to the devices is because you always get some unintended changes that create the best sounding effects.

I once had a kids keyboard guitar thing that would only distort if you pressed the fake whammy bar. and it was touch sensitive by mere accident.

>>1105274
Of course any effect peddle that you add to the output is reversible, but modifying a black dot will be irreversible no matter what. Don't get me wrong, I love circuit bending, it's just not really feasible with a black dot.

One thing that I have done in the past that worked out okay is to replace parts of the toy with real instrument parts. For example, I had a plastic microphone with a plastic stand and a little speaker built in. I modified the mic by removing the old mic element and replacing it with a real microphone head in the plastic body, then replacing the crappy speaker with a decent speaker and adding a small power amplifier. The whole thing ended up being a mixture of plastic and metal which looked good, and the new components allowed it to feedback in to itself pretty good. I threw in a little vocal chopper circuit with a couple of knobs to finish it off and it came out great.

There are some things that you can do to modify toys with the black dot, it just depends on your level of creativity and determination. You'll never truly bend them like a speak and spell or anything else that has real components though.