here’s a gallery of most of my older bends which i had not put up on this site, but have on my m*space page (remember that annoying place?). i didnt feel like doing an individual post for each of these since they are almost all just your standard pitching type thing.. but if you really wanted to know about any of them i would be happy to tell.
the picture above is from a previous move where i pulled out all of the random things i had scurried away in my closet and in the corners for the obligitory toy pile shot!
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.
this was done for the Creatures & Devices show. your standard circuit bent speak & read with a fancy paint job. since this was intended to be on display for public use i kept to a very minimal set of bends to avoid it locking up or crashing too easily. it has a glitch stream switch, a pitch knob, a hold switch with release button, a touch point for tremolo and a reset button. maybe i will a few more bends now. the paint job was done with acrylic, aerosol and pen and sealed with clear coat. although i painted over the membrane all the buttons are still functional. this guy is for sale. if you are interested contact me.
i initially had trouble getting the SA9 to glitch until i realized that the trick is quick momentary connections. this little guy spits out some crazy and amazing sounds! you generally have to coax it a little to get the really fantastic stuff, but it’s capable of some great long evolving glitches.
across the top the additions are: 1/4″ output, patch burp switch (causes it to rapidly change patches), rotary switch for ranges of patches burped, overdrive/feedback switch with knob for amount, main glitch button, 2nd noisy glitch button, led and power switch.
here is an example of the burp, overdrive and glitches:
and a diagram of the main bends:
here’s a less abstract version of the diagram above:
the pt80 is a pretty cool little keyboard. it has accompaniment and a chord section, leds that light up with the keys and a rom card slot. the card it came with has ‘thriller’, ‘karma chameleon’, ’still rock and roll to me’ and ‘dont be cruel’ on it. not sure how elvis fits in with those.. but its a sweet selection.
i added a pitch knob which takes it down pretty slow, and when used with the body contacts can drop down to sheer noise. most of the switches are bends that accentuate different drum sounds such as making the kick synthy or turning the hi hats into a snare sound. there is also a tone with a photocell that controls its pitch. in some light settings it gets this interesting filtered drum sound. you can hear it in the clip below.
the classic circuit bending candidate - the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell. this one has a pretty standard set of bends - pitch control, 2 short glitches, 1 long glitch, hold switch with release button, body contact, startup sound loop and a reset button. there is also a cv input with amount that controls the pitch.
this guy has been a mainstay in the studio and has been used live many times.
here are a couple of sound samples of it:
basic bends - long glitch, pitch and hold:
this is a held glitch being modulated throught the cv inpuit:
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Speak & Read - 2002
this was my favorite but it died. a Speak & Read that i removed the button membrane on. the Read is a little more wordy than the Spell and has some interesting glitches where it spits out weird phrases. this also has the standard bends - pitch, glitches, hold and distort. what was really cool about it was a bend that modified the hold so that it would change over time.
heres the glitch modify if you want to try it:
(i tried this recently on another read but it didnt work.. so maybe not on all revisions..)
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Speak & Read - 2003
this one has a 555 based lfo and photo cell both to control pitch. also regular pitch knob, glitch and hold. looks pretty nice but ended up not being a playable as the others, although you can get some nifty scratching type sounds from it using the photo cell.
