The Haunted House

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Circuit Bending Challenge

Today I took part in the Circuit Bending Challenge run by CreateDigitalMusic.com. The idea of the challenge is to go out and buy a toy, bend it, document it, and present it all in 1 day. I haven't done a circuit bend for about 6 months now. I originally did a load of circuit bending to create sounds for my latest album, Distant Horizon, out next month. Because of the time elapsed since my last bend, I was really looking forward to today.

Here are some links to my previous bends:


  1. Unleashing Satan From The Machine
  2. Furby part 1 and part 2
  3. Circuit Bent Childrens Telephone
  4. Speak and Spell
  5. Talking Kids Computer
  6. Yamaha PSS-80


I left the house about 10am to go into Belper to visit a charity shop and get my circuit bending victim. Unfortunately when I got into town none of the charity shops were open. To cap it all off it started pissing it down with rain whilst I walked back. DOH!!



Never mind. I looked in the cupboard under the stairs and found some old toys from earlier on in the year that I hadn't bent yet and found this kids plastic guitar. It seemed ideal :-)



After removing what seemed like 1000 screws I finally got inside the toy and started probing with some wires. I found 3 bends that sounded pretty cool, but that was about it.



I attached 1 switch that acts as a high pass filter. Another push button switch that works as a glitch. and I attached 2 screws that are body contact points. This drastically effects the pitch of the toy when touched. Even more so if your hands are sweaty.



I wanted to fit a head phones jack to the instrument so I could wire it up to the mixer, but after rummaging around my tool box I couldn't find any jack outputs. I could have sworn I had some. Not to worry, it was a good excuse to use my Zoom H4 recorder instead.



Well there you go, my entry in the challenge. The toy sounds quite cool when you play around with the body contact points and switches. It is a shame I couldn't find many more decent bends on this device. I spent a couple of hours searching, but nothing that didn't result in the machine locking up. Here is an MP3 of the recording I made. It's only 1.5 minutes long, but gives a good impression of the newly added controls.

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1 Comments:

  • Hey - it sounds great. I did a guitar too. Glad to see/hear people rocking it.

    By Blogger El Colin, at 6:24 pm  

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