On the table:
Yamaha rx-17 drum machine with 27 point copper nail patch bay (with flashing lights!)
Vtech Little Talking Scholar bring played through…. Bent “White Owl” Ibanez tube screamer
Korg Kaossilator
bent Zenith transistor radio
The radio gets all kinds off cool interference from the other boxes.
Tuning it, moving it, or touching the body contacts affects the sound.
My lovely wife Sarah got me this great gizmo for my birthday. It’s a pocket sized synth. It has 100 preset sounds (watch out for those techno shades) including thereminesque leads, deep sub bass, strange sound effects, drum samples and patterns.
Simply dial up the key and scale, and run your finger around the pad to produce shockingly great sounding arpeggios and melodies. It also can loop what you’re playing, so plug in your headphones and construct miniatures on the go.
I hooked it up to our stereo, and now our living room has become a tranced out techno club. The dogs are all waving glow sticks in the air, and baby Emmett just tossed me an invisible energy ball.
Here are a few quick samples, mostly recorded straight with little or no editing….
My ever lovin’ wife got me a safari flashlight from cracker barrel for jewish christmas. What a woman!
It makes a variety of jungle noises and promptly got bent.
I also recently acquired an old italian keyboard by bontempi, which was packed by a moron and arrived broken from ebay (thanks for nothing, Dean Sancho!). Anyways I popped it open and think I can fix it up. Also from ebay a barbie karaoke which is basically a gritty little amp with built in delay - also not bent yet.
Some fun in the attic last night, despite the cold. . . .
This is the second version of my homemade oscillator synth box thingy. It uses a 555 chip like the last one and a 556 like in Forrest Mims III’s “sound synthesizer” AKA the Atari Punk Console.
Top right, there is a toggle switch to power up a repeating rhythmic pulse or a push button that only plays when its pressed down.
At the top are two flashing LED arms linked to two of the oscillators’ outputs. In the center is a photoresistor linked to the pitch control.
The knobs control the rate, pitch, and range.
The “keyboard” has four tunable buttons that can control either the pitch or the range.
On the right are two switches that exchange capacitor values jumping the pitch up or just changing the timbre depending on the other settings.
And below that are three switches that route the 555 back into various pins on the 556 for a variety of lively tonal effects reminiscent of the harp or a piano.
So there it is! Fun to play and look at. If I can find some decent enclosures, I may try to build some more of these.
Here are the two Schatz boxes in tandem:
This is my first instrument designed and built from scratch. Well, the design isn’t particularly original, but it was fun to build, and came out pretty cool.
It’s a basic square wave generator, composed of two 555 LFOs, one feeding the other. YUM!
Similar to the Atari Punk.
The two knobs up top control the rate and pitch. The switches and knobs below create a crude keyboard. One cool feature is that different combinations of buttons add up to higher pitches. Lots of fun to play.
Here it is jamming with a yamaha dd-5 circuit bent drum machine:
I’ve got some glitches to work out, and I am going to try to build a sequencer like this one:
This is a circuit bent yamaha pss-130. It only has 2 knobs on it, an overdrive and a “choke” filter. Simple but tasty. The original sounds are just thick squarewave-y luscious nintendo sounding tones. I think I might try to add an LFO that controls the distortion or some such to give it a tremolo effect.
Try playing both videos together! if you get the timing right, it works perfectly.
Bert and Ernie never sounded so twisted.
Last Weekend, my lady and I were combing the local flea market here in Hadley, Mass looking for this and that, enjoying the extreme people watching, and praying for some cheap circuit bending fodder. I got a cheap little toy keyboard for a buck, but wasn’t too excited about it. We were nearly done visiting all the various piles of old junk and cheap crap, when I spied something that had some serious potential. After an intense bargaining back and forth with an old lady in a mumu which culminated in her nearly taking out her teeth and throwing them at me, I threw her a few bucks and left with a mint condition Vtech Talking Whiz Kid Plus. Awesome! Here it is after my mayhem:
You know where I’ve been . . . I’ve been up in the attic.
I’ve recently discovered the joys of making music with Ableton Live. Ableton makes sampling and looping easy and fun, but not shallow or stupid. You can design tracks and play them like instruments. You can sculpt the sounds and effects in real time or go back and micro manage areas. It really combines all the things I want from music software.
Matching beats and tempos is so easy, you can make a Girl Talk style mash up in minutes. I’ve been downloading acapellas and I whipped up a few mixes for your listening pleasure. My new goal is to become the mash up king of West Hatfield.
I will crush you if you stand in my way.
california-wanksta-rendered-2.mp3
“California WANKSTA” samples ten songs including “Turn This Car Around” Tom Petty, “California Love” by Dr DRE and Tupac, “Spiders” by Wilco, some Tony Bennett, Chopin, and even a little of Braxton’s Ghost Trance. I especially like the manic section at theend. I looped him calling you a “wankst” over and over. Awesomely crazy.
dont-you-evah-milkshake-2-rendered.mp3
“I drink it up!” My version of “Milkshake” samples from Tony Allen, Raymond Scott, Rage Against the Machine, Spoon, Vampire Weekend, Townes Van Zandt, Fabulous and Nate Dogg, Toots and the Matytals, and the Velvets.
A creepy remix of “Sexual Healing“.
And a couple of tracks from my upcoming Electro Kraut solo project:
kraut-dog-rendered-1.mp3
assembly-lines-rendered-2.mp3
Enjoy!
