141 replies to this topic

[Chad Burger]

**snuggles russ**

[Chad Burger]

Today started out really good.. I found a wiring loom, working equaliser, av cables and a NES and 3 carts in the roadside rubbish! Annnnnnd then scored a Country Moog record for a buck at an op shop. I felt like I couldn't lose.... so I thought I'd try my hand at some bending projects I'd been thinking of for ages.... and failed horribly. I wrecked 2 little kids keyboards trying to bend the bastards and was about to give up til I remembered this great little guitar thing that plays noises and riffs like the last ninja on C64. So I went all oscillator on it's arse and here's what I made:



Yes....red and lots of buttons. That's a good sign. So these are the bits I put on:

A headstock mounted photocell.

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....4d4f8dd6f_b.jpg[/img]

And the photocell is hooked up to a pitch bend with the two yellow dials to tweak it all up or all down. Sounds lovely. This toy glitches really nicely. And the drum sounds sound like robot wind!

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....56d10d193_b.jpg[/img]

Another angle!

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....0e989d0f9_b.jpg[/img]


I also gave it a guitar jack out. Loud is good. The other two dials and switch are tweaking another 555 oscillator/LED joined to a photocell inside like my last yellow keytar setup. Here's another look at the oscillator dials. They are great knobs.

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....a3c470861_b.jpg[/img]

So one of the dials regulates the speed of the 555 and thus the flashing LED and thus the pulse rate of pitch bend and the other one adjusts the brightness of the LED and thus the difference in pitch between the pulses.... this toy sounds like LAZERS and BUCK ROGERS. I was pulling some great sounds off this tonight, it'll be fun to bust out at a live show.

Want to see its' guts? Sure you do...

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....2b685d296_b.jpg[/img]

Another fucking hack of a wiring job but it's all good. One difference with this bend in regards to the oscillator is I've connected in a capacitor in parallel with the two LEDs- this makes the light flash on then fade out over about half a second giving a nice little decay on the end of each pulse. Lovely. You can see it sort of jammed into the handle bit of the guitar.

Here's the 555 timer:

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....a46163965_b.jpg[/img]

Urrggh, ugly sir. See the black tube thing with the bulges in it? That's the LED face to face with a photocell. Since I've connected this shrink wrapped one and the outside mounted on in parallel they flash together... more flashing lights!

Yeah so again the switch flips between manual or oscillator aided tweaking. Good times.

Party on.

[anesthesia]

holy fuck you are insane. that thing looks so awesome. and i love the determination, 2 failures then a success.

i applaud you Mr.Burger

[Chad Burger]

One of the two kids keyboards I ruined was actually really good and I really fucked up by destroying it. I had re-housed the circuit in a plastic cardiac pacemaker case and was trying to get the circuit to run on 9 volts instead of its intended 3.... and being a meat head I didn't realise I was gonna fry it till too late... It is only my second bending casualty but sadly like the one before it, I think it would have had real potential to sound fantastic.

It's a cruel world, sir.

[Chad Burger]

I had a very productive few hours in my lab last night.

Firstly here is my:

Bent Happy Clap Discoteque Crowd Simulator.



Ah, I see...

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....36429c804_b.jpg[/img]

So this plays a few samples of crowd noises and claps and drums that I can now tweak with the two new pitch bend dials. Also the lights on top flash and sort of spin around which I find totally hilarious in a micro disco way. When you slow the clock right down with the bend the white noise of the samples sounds really like the white noise on my microkorg and the samples sound great slowed down to about half time, like a tired crowd applauding my bending efforts from under the sea or something, very Ween yes...

I didn't put a photocell on this one (even though I totally could have) because they sound better to me if you put em on toys that generate notes like a keyboard not just crowd samples and I didn't want to waste the components (spot the tight arse).

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....5141cf1a5_b.jpg[/img]

Now, what's this? Two (yes TWO!) jacks....

Well aside from the standard upgrade to "line-out carrying status" I give all my toys I was thrilled to discover that this toy had a LINE IN jack already. So I got all excited thinking I could use this toy to process external signals... in my mind I'd have filter sweeps and EQ's all over the place I'd be all like Daft Punk, and pressing one of the sample buttons I could hear the crowd go wild....

In reality however I re-wired the jack and after an extended period of swearing and general toy butchery had managed to mount the new line-in jack (fucking hack job) was not so thrilled to discover all the line in thing does is pass the input signal straight through to the speaker/line out and it does nothing to process it at all so that was a bit of a fizzer.

But it got me thinking about the world of signal processing......

[Chad Burger]

Yes, the shady world of signal processing..... so I got down from the shelf my voice vocoder trumpet thing that I've been meaning to tweak for a long while now and transformed it into:

The Cylonator 4000 Gizztron Vocoder.



Here's another gander.

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....408538592_b.jpg[/img]

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm3.static....8321c6c12_b.jpg[/img]

I gave this guy a line-out jack, a line-in jack and two switches, one to switch on the device so you don't have to hold the trigger down and the other to switch between the line in jack and the existing condenser mic input.

Not really "bending", more like "modding" if you want to get wanky about it (and believe me, I do).

So now I can use it like a voice vocoder like it was designed with the provided condenser mic or I can run a line into it and process keyboards, guitars other bent toys etc....

I have put a few things through it and by adjusting the dip switch bank on the side of this in various combinations you can make your voice sound like Darth Vader, an original series Battlestar Galactica cylon, a smurf.... you get the picture... and it gets really interesting putting guitars and keys through it (my church organ sounds INSANE through this thing) but when you put a bent toy through it like my yellow keytar with the oscillator controls I feel like I've unlocked some arcane power that humans shouldn't have stumbled on yet until we have matured as a species enough to use this vast new power in a benevolent way for the good of all creatures in the universe (**cough**).

Instead I will use my powers for domination and destruction and as night shift psychosis fully transforms me into a creature so twisted and evil not even my cat will recognise me, let my neighbours be warned- I'm coffee'd to the eyeballs, have been averaging 4 hours a day sleep for the last 2 weeks and now possess the most offensive audio weapon available to humanity and I fully intend to abuse this power as much as I possibly can before either I'm too exhausted to continue or the combined armies of the free world rally together to overthrow me from my throne and the self proclaimed title of Grand High Gizzard Overlord Of The Universe.

[anesthesia]

the amazement continues to grow with your earth shattering prowess.

[MD.]

picked up a furby yesterday, had a fried speaker. installed a new one and speaker jack this afternoon. put a body contact in to rape its voice and it lulz. I know furbys have been done to death, but i couldnt let him sit in the op shop all by himself... now ill i gotta do is insert some red LED into his eyes for extra demonic affect. Just about to fire up the laptop to send him some IR messages, hopefully i'll be able to remote control the fucker.

still have the gameboy in bits, should really finish him off too.... ah i cbf.

[Chad Burger]

I built this as a present for a good friend of mine. I called it The Gizzatron Pacemaker.



Oh yes, may we please see its' guts sir?

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm5.static....a23b8c5dd_b.jpg[/img]

Soooo here's the deal. The two circuit boards you see in there are both 555 oscillators. I got a whole bunch of them pre-made off getlofi.com and it is so much quicker and easier just soldering on the components rather then dicking around with bread board, let me tell you.

One of them generates a nice phat synth tone that you can control the pitch of (like a theremin) with the photocell on the front that says "Tweak Me". The other one drives a flashing LED. The LED is hot glued face to face with another photocell that is patched in to the pitch control of the first oscillator. It's the classy green electrical tape blob. It's just the same as the vactrol set ups on the other toys in this thread.

So one switch turns it on for hand controlled tweakage. Flip the second switch and the second oscillator takes over with one dial adjusting the brightness of the LED/depth of tone changes and the other adjusting the rate of the flashes/oscillations. There is a second LED in parellel on the front so you can see the rate/depth as well as hear it.

It has an out. Yes.

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm5.static....798960485_b.jpg[/img]

I reason I called it the "pacemaker" is because I got the grey case from a friend of mine who works as a medical prothesis technician and specialises in installation and servicing of pacemakers. The coolest thing about the case is that it originally was for storing a real pacemaker that he "installed" in someone. The pacemaker from this box is currently keeping somones heart beating and I think that's pretty cool.

[img width=400 height=300]http://farm5.static....4959cf0d5_b.jpg[/img]

There you go.

Party on.

[anesthesia]

another piece of brilliance.

[Chad Burger]

Here you go.


12042011607 by ohmissjane89, on Flickr

Pitch bends plus photocell tweakage.


12042011609 by ohmissjane89, on Flickr

Plus this old chestnut.


14092010339 by ohmissjane89, on Flickr

Lots of pitch bend stuff and yet another oscillator. I'm mad for them.


14092010341 by ohmissjane89, on Flickr

More soon. Party on.

[Chad Burger]

There's this fuzz nugget


08072010212 by ohmissjane89, on Flickr

[stereobonghits]

wow, first time i look at the nerd forum and i find this gem thread.
the attached picture was my first bending attempt... it turned out ok, not great... its just the clock resistor replaced with a variable resistor and input jack added.

Attached Files

•  IMG_0267.JPG   358.99K   4 downloads

[Chad Burger]

Hey great job stereobonghits. Are you still bending?

Here's some recent builds.


310820111178 by ohmissjane89, on Flickr

This is my Gizzatron 4000 Satanic Luigi Atari Punk Console with 555 driven LFO.

I got an atari punk console kit from getlofi.com sometime ago and just got around to building it. These circuits are sometimes known as Stepped Frequency Sound Generators. They sound pretty damn cool and if you search for them on youtube you'll find billions of people have built them. My contribution to the world of APCs is that I have used a 555 oscillator to run an LFO component to my one. I have also given it an in so that it can respond to controlled voltage which is quite cool. Also Luigis' eyes light up and flash with the pulses from the 555 and the APC... it's really very satanic.


300820111167 by ohmissjane89, on Flickr

Here we have a Standard Gizzard Issue Photo Theremin. The Gizzards v's Yuncken Edition. It's a present for a good friend.

Party on.

[Gav]

I would pay shitloads for your Gizzatron 4000 Chadburger.


Shitloads

[stereobonghits]

Chad Burger, on 31 August 2011 - 06:16 PM, said:

Hey great job stereobonghits. Are you still bending?

Thanks man! I haven't bent anything since that one, although after seeing your stuff I want do some more.
I made a diy syth thing i found HERE that sounds rad.
I bought some 555 chips not too long ago, might have to find something for them!

[Chad Burger]

stereobonghits- Oh wow that synth looks pretty cool. You could use yr 555s to add LFO to that pretty easily I would think. You could substitute (or switch between) one of yr pots with a photocell then use yr 555 to make a flashing LED you can tweak the rate of flashes with another pot and add another pot to vary the resistance to the light and thus the brightness. Then hotglue or shrink tube the LED and the photocell face to face in a light shielded tube and you've got a vactrol. So then you should be able to patch in LFO with rate and depth controls. That's what I do with a lot of my toys that have pitch bends. It's a great simple bend that sounds amazing.

In reality it's much easier then I seem to have explained it. You can get 555 timer kits and boards from getlofi.com real cheap. Also you can get a pretty cool tone out of the 555 from one of those getlofi boards if you hook up the square wave out to a speaker/jack. I think it also produces a triangle wave but I use the square.

So nice to talk to someone into this stuff in this city.

Gav- thanks man! ps how much is "shitloads"  pps at the risk of ruining a plum deal for myself if you have a soldering iron and some patience you could easily build your own one of these.

[Gav]

Well I will admit it would be a fairly relative figure... relative as in I'm a student and I have... vices

but I sure hope that Gizzatron 4000 went straight to the pool room

[Gav]

This has nothing on the Gizzatron (that thing has me breaking out in cold sweats and bouts of insomnia!), but my latest project, this here function generator/circuit builder-tester/time machine will come in well handy for some funky bending I bet. If I can only expand my mind a little and break into the world of bending that is

Edited by Gav, 02 September 2011 - 12:15 AM.

[Chad Burger]

Wow, that does look like a time machine. Bending is good. Earlier in this thread I posted links to a couple of sites, so have a read. If you can already modify circuits and solder thats half the battle. It's really pretty easy to get into.

DO IT NOW.