Circut bending

[guitargully]

Hey all.. i think we need som more interest in this forum.. lol. anyways, a band called david crowder*band - www.davidcrowderband.com - uses circut bending in some of thier music. They rip appart a keyboard and take wires out, touch em to odd places and if they like the sound they put a switch there so they can use that sound. Itmakes some really cool bleeps and blops. I found another sight where people have taken those talk and spell or talking teacher game type things and turned them inot bend circuts. Anyone ever do this or have any advice on what to try?

[joe carrow]

Hey guitargully, neat topic.

I was going to write a reply, but it really took too much space to say everything, so I just posted it on my website. The 10,000 character limit for posts is a little restricting.

http://jzoe.com/reply.html


It's got some links and commentary.

[guitargully]

Hey man thanks much! Now to check out the links...

[benny]

a good tip is to learn what earth is if you dont already know, and work out where the earth conections are in your circuit... now you know where this is, don't go shorting stuff to earth... especially any voltage rails... and try not to short anything in the signal path to ground either... this kind of defeats the purpose of this exercise.

if you want to take it to another level of control, add a pot in series with your jumper leads to adjust.

[freshnelly]

I love ( and always have ) circuit bending.
When I was 12 I found a ( what I now know to be ) morse code practice oscillator discarded at the dump near our house.
It had several wires so I decided to cautiously connect a battery to different wires. ( I say cautious as there was a scare with kids setting off discarded blasting caps in the dumps and losing fingers etc at the time! )
One combination gave me a mild shock. Because I knew a bit about telephones ( my father was a phone repair guy ) I decided to hook it to a phone earpeice to see what it sounded like.
A beautiful tone ensued, and I was hooked!

I must have connected every electronic part I could find to that thing with paper clip switches and had it making "weird alien sounds" chirps and buzzes that were not of this world.
Keep in mind this was the 70's and Kraftwerk were breaking ground with their stunning sounds at this time, although I wouldn't know of them for some years hehe!
My mother instructed me to leave the house if I was going to play with this amazing contraption and it's "devil sounds" and my brother thought I was crazy.

If I'd have been in Germany, I would probably be world famous, but in a Cowtown I was just a wierd kid doin' wierd stuff.

Now I design a lot of cool circuits for myself ( and sometimes others ) analogue and digital but still love to randomly poke a jumper here and there!

I guess I'm just an old school circuit bender at heart