MiscelanËa circuit bending talk and demo

again, this is an old update, from last january, when Pablo and me gave a short talk and demo about circuit bending in miscelana space the event was inscribed in the Improvised Music cicle of the musical association ’embut”…

Chaos champion

this circuit comes from a teddy bear, which had 8 a spanish voice sounds. and i modified the circuit with usual basic bends like pitch resistor replacement for a pot and body contacts….after a little more investigation, found some interesting glitching distortions, adding capacitors of different values… also added the looped sound trigger mode…

everything was then recased into a beautiful old electronic vintage chess game from my grandfather…

and of course i had to add the reglamentary audio out, because the sound quality of this circuit improves dramatically when connected to an external amplifyer…

and finally here is a video of the champ of chaosssssssfrgegrfg…..

another bend from 9volts

expo in ALMAZEN

ok this is an old info, but an update at least…

this is a link to the info about the expo we did last sumer:

and the interview on the newspaper ELMUNDO catalunya ; the text is in catalan, so sorry for the non catalan speakers and here a picture taken for the article…

echo filter box box ox ox x x x x…..

this is just a recasing project, i just moved the circuit and knobs from a toy karaoke amplifier, to a much nicer case, changing the mike input for a couple line inputs, one of them is pre-amplified and the oter not…

the nice lo-fi echo filter is adjustable in lenght and number of repetitions, wich gives enough control, never tried to bend the circuit because i’m happy with it like it is, enough for enchancing the sound of some of my mini synth designs….

recased by 9volts

4LDR_Synth

This time, the goal was to build a little instrument, to be played by hands, this kind of device is often called an opto-theremin…

In this case I build the circuit from scratch using a similar schematic as in my little hex-schmitt trigger synth, but instead of the IC 74c14 I used the 4093, which is a Quad 2-input NAND Schmitt trigger; This is a great IC to build oscillator-synths because it allows you to gate each output with a switch or with another oscillator…

here is a diagram of the 4093 IC connection pins:

4093 pin connections

and here is the schematic for the 4LDR synth:

4093-synth-schematics

note that i wrote the values of components guessing what i used because i don’t remember exactly, anyway you can play with different values to achive the sound performance that you prefer…. as it can be seen in the diagram, the Light dependent resistors are placed in series with little faders which allows to adjust the range of response of the LDRs;

and here a video of me testing the little instrument, where you can hear all the r2d2-like sounds which this instrument is able to make…this little synth is one of the most fun and intuitive instruments i had build until now, and it is also my wife’s favourite…

by 9volts