this little guy is a circuit bent ‘Little Smart PC Fun’ by Vtech. its quite the nice glitcher! it sputters out endless streams of random rhythmic musical gibberish, as well as vocabulary dumps and lots of ‘hellos’.
this is the second one of these i have done, so i decided to make it a little fancier than the last by encasing it in a cigar box and keeping the little screen which also glitches out. the knob is a rotary switch that selects different modes, and the buttons l-r are ‘on’, ‘arrow’, ‘enter’, ‘arrow’ and ‘off’. the 3 switches are for 3 different glitches.
last night i saw Eric Barbour of Metasonix speak and show off some of his new goodies at Robot Speak in SF.
on display was the new KV-100 multi effects unit, the Ass Blaster. its a collection of some of his previous effects units with the inclusion of a new novel filter design. pretty awesome sounding tube signal mangling and the filter is really nice!
we got to see the prototype of a tube based drum machine Eric is building! yes.. tube based drum synthesis. It sounded incredible!
he also brought with him a prototype alternative midi keyboard controller which he used to trigger a demo version of the Wretch Machine.
Eric spoke about the vacuum tube industry with many amusing anecdotes. he also taked about the increasing difficulties of producing products such as the ones he makes, as many of the resources needed for industrial fabrication have moved overseas.
All and all an interesting and entertaining evening of tube knowledge and sounds! Plus he gave us some tubes too.. thanks!
