What I Bent Over My Summer Vacation

What I Bent Over My Summer Vacation

circuit-bent synthesizer array

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll remember that I went kind of gonzo about circuit-bending this past Spring. After about half a dozen posts, I realized that not many of my readers could relate to my interest in rewiring children’s electronic toys. So, I dumbed down my posts to encourage the idiots among you to keep reading, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest in making music with creatively modified, cast-off electronic toys.

Quite the contrary, over the summer I created a number of circuit-bent instruments from electronic toys I found in our local thrift stores. While not every toy I bent, worked out as well as I hoped, enough of them survived surgery that I now have an array of amusing looking, capable, and unique sounding of synthesizers at my disposal.

While most electronic toys designed for children are nearly bullet-proof, they all share one weakness. One substance has probably stopped more electronic toys from ever working again than any other. This substance corrupts them from the inside, like kryptonite does to Superman. That substance is pee.

According to my extensive research, fully half of all electronic toys found in thrift stores, contain pee. Sure, they’ve cleaned the toy off. You can’t see any pee on it, but set it down in front of your dog or cat. They’ll let you know. Of course, when you open the toy, you’ll find it. Usually, it leaks through the keyboard, or the buttons, and directly onto the little membrane switches beneath them. This causes keys not to play, and functions not to work. Sometimes you can fix these problems with a thorough cleaning, sometimes not.

The worst case pee scenario happens when pee gets all over the main circuit board. Such was the case with my beloved Bratz drum bra. The cups of the bra channeled cat pee directly onto the main circuit board where it dried to an oily, foul smelling film and proceeded to corrode everything. Despite that, the device continued to work, at least long enough for me to add a pitch bend control and a line out, which actually made it into a great sounding instrument. Since then, however, it works only intermittently.

Now that the sun has disappeared behind the hillside, leaving my photovoltaic panels unkissed by sunlight until next March, and thus bringing my summer soldering season to an end, I’ve begun exploring the musical potential I’ve unleashed in these newly altered devices. Allow me to introduce you to a couple of them:

Introducing; My Circuit-Bent Casio ML1

 

This amazing little instrument pleases me greatly. Stock, it actually makes some pretty good sounds, including a decent imitation of a piano, and it still works as originally intended. However I’ve added a matrix of touch sensors which allow me to directly stimulate the electronic “brain” of the ML1, releasing its previously untapped potential for composing original music of apparently infinite variety. I enjoy collaborating with the ML1, a relatively young composer, and very much a product of the digital age. As a composer, the ML1 speaks to the age in which we live.

I titled our first collaboration 13 Minutes at the End of Time. The modified ML1 generated every note, phrase, rhythm and noise heard in this piece. My input came only in the form of touching the sensors that I added. Touching any two of these sensors at the same time, creates a new connection within the ML1′s electronic “brain”, causing it to “think outside the box” with surprising originality.

Like many young composers, the modified ML1 favors quick tempos and complex poly-rhythms, but it balances them with subtle textures and sustained notes that float serenely over the fray. I think this piece reflects the relentless sensory overload and chaos of our wired lifestyle. At 13 minutes, it runs a little longer than the typical modern attention span, but some of us still know how to listen. 13 Minutes at the End of Time also provides the perfect ambiance to induce stress into any situation.

Pretty in Pink

 

I found this pink “girly” toy keyboard at a thrift store around here. Although it had a few splashes of pee inside it, it cleaned up easily with no damage to the electronics. This toy says “Starring Me” on the front, but it looks identical to this “Barbie” toy keyboard bent by Bogus Noise UK, and immortalized in this video. I presume I have the generic version of the same toy.

I took a different approach to this toy than did the braceletted British bender who bent the bejeezus out of that Barbie brand Bontempi. I started with the ubiquitous pitch-bend mod. This is one of the easiest, and most universal bends that you can make on an electronic toy, especially the cheap ones.

Almost all of theses little noise-making electronic toys, use a single resistor to set the speed of the central processor. If you change the resistance of that resistor, you can make the whole machine operate faster or slower, which in turn, raises or lowers the pitch of all the noises it makes. You will usually find this resistor located right next to the black blob in the center of the circuit board, often labeled “R1”.

If you touch this resistor at both ends, the toy will usually go up or down in pitch dramatically, or stop working all together. If you replace that resistor with a potentiometer, you can use that potentiometer to sweep the pitch of the sounds up or down. This opens up a lot of new potential sounds for you to exploit.

In this pink girly keyboard, I used one of the purple ornamental flowers as the knob to adjust the pitch. The three switches on the lower left, allow me to switch even more resistance into the circuit, which allows me to play the keyboard in four distinct registers, with the pitch-bend knob active in all of them. This four-speed pitch-bend mod extends the toys range by nearly an octave above, and several octaves below, it’s original voice.

I made one other major modification to the sound of this pink girly keyboard. I added a passive ring modulator. A passive ring modulator adds a very weird kind of distortion, and it allows you to use another signal to change the harmonic profile of that distortion in very strange ways. Q Reed Ghazala shared this schematic of a passive ring modulator on his Anti-Theory website.

It looked pretty simple to me, consisting of two transformers and four diodes. Even I could handle that. For the secondary, or “Y” signal, (that modifies the original or “X” signal) I built an analog square-wave oscillator from an 8-pin “555” chip, relying on the instructions I found in the Crème DeMentia “Bending Buddy” comic book. Everyone interested in circuit-bending should check out the Crème Dementia kits and comics.

Both circuits fit easily on a 2” square piece of circuit-board, and inside the toy. The “Y” oscillator has an independent on/off switch with an indicator LED, and a pitch control knob. Another knob blends the “Y” oscillator with the “X” signal. You can see the switch and indicator light between the two purple flowers on the upper right, and the control knobs located to the immediate right of the keyboard.

I displaced one of the ornamental purple flowers to make space for a quarter inch phone jack that serves as a line-level output, but I re-purposed the flower as the pitch-control knob. I added three tiny LEDs to the handle, to make my new instrument extra pretty, an amber one in the center, flanked by two red ones, because I had them lying around. The red ones came out of a small power inverter that burned out, and the amber one came from a disposable led tea light, with a dead battery.

How does it sound? Th passive ring modulator give this toy a very biting and aggressive sound, reminiscent of a an old Farfisa organ through a fuzz box. The analog oscillator feeding the “Y” oscillator dramatically alters the harmonic character of the sound in real time, with a twist of a knob, not unlike an analog synthesizer, and imparts an authentically analog Theremin-like sound on it’s own.

I composed this rather abstract, obtuse, but somehow endearing piece entirely with the newly modified pink girly toy keyboard. It reminds me of some of the electronic music popular in sci-fi movies of the sixties.

As you can see my enthusiasm for circuit-bending has not waned.  I hope at least a few of you enjoyed this look at a couple of my new instruments. I built these instruments to force me to think about music in different ways, and I hope this approach will lead to some interesting and hopefully compelling music in the coming months.  Stay tuned.

Does Anyone Remember Laughter

Does Anyone Remember Laughter?

 

Do you remember when this blog used to be funny? You neither huh. I know its been awhile, but just hang in there. Look, it’s summertime, and sometimes I like to pretend like I have a life outside of this blog. I just need a little ME time, OK. It’s not like I don’t still deliver at least one thought-provoking essay every week.

 

My economic advice column: On The Money; Economic Advice for the 99% offers the kind of sound economic counsel that you won’t get from other pundits, the kind of advice you need to make sense of our current economic crisis, and make the decisions that will determine your future. Even though I can’t think of a more absurd or ridiculous subject than economics, I’ll admit that not everything about it is hilarious. You should read On The Money, every week, because the future is at stake, and some things are more important than a cheap laugh. There’s a little extra economic advice that’s On The Money.

 

Still, I really don’t want to lose those readers who don’t give a fuck about the future. Many of you can barely muster enough enthusiasm to get through today, let alone tomorrow, and you look to this blog for a bit of laughter that provides sweet relief from the misery of your pitiful lives. I know how you feel. I mean, I don’t really know how you feel, but if you read this blog regularly, I can’t imagine that you are a happy, well adjusted person. So I sympathize.

 

But really, what do you do for me, besides suck up my creativity? Could you leave a comment, or click the fucking like button once in a while? Is that too much to ask?!? Statistics tell me that over six-thousand people a week visit this site. Every fucking minute of every fucking day, someone is looking at this site, just sitting there, impassively, expecting me to entertain them, or inform them, or provide them with a photograph of a tattooed penis, on demand, 24-7-365, and they want to see new material every week. Even that’s not enough for them, they want new funny material every week.

 

So do I! Do you think I like going through my day without chuckling to myself about something silly. Lately, I’ve been too busy playing with my Bratz drum machine and Barbie keyboard to think of anything funny to write about. Does the irony in that statement count?

 

I have a list of unfunny projects that I absolutely have to get done this summer. I’ve got to split a few cords of firewood. Humor doesn’t help me there. Hatred, rage, and resentment go a long way toward getting that firewood chopped, humor, not so much. You don’t want to know what goes through my mind when I chop firewood, so I’ll keep that to myself.

 

Even the TV networks go into reruns in the summertime, but people still watch them. So cut me some slack. I’ll bet you’ve missed a few good posts in the last 15 months. Here’s a few pieces that I like, but really haven’t gotten the play I think they deserve.

New Courses HSU Should Offer

SoHum Vacation Guide

How to Party Now That the Party’s Over

And please, keep coming back for more.

 

Barbie v Bratz

Barbie v Bratz

 

For a middle-aged guy, I spend a lot of time prowling the toy section of our local thrift stores. As you can imagine, “Barbie”, the Grand Dame of Mattel’s gigantic toy empire, remains a ubiquitous presence in the racks of pre-abused toys I regularly survey. The last time I visited the thrift store in the Manilla Community Ctr, I found a a clear plastic shoebox full of naked Barbie dolls. They must have had at least 30 naked Barbie dolls in that box.

 

Of course, that many Barbie dolls would not fit in a shoebox if they were all facing the same way. Sure, you could fit 30 pairs of Barbie doll feet in at one end of the box, but the boobs of thirty Barbie dolls would surely topple over, and spill out at the other end of the box. So, to fit them all in the box, these Barbies were stacked head-to-toe in a kind of multiple 69 configuration. I’m not sure whether it looked more like a big-haired lesbian orgy, or an all-blonde mass grave, but lets just say that the image of that shoebox full of naked Barbies has stayed with me, perhaps a bit longer than I’d like.

I’ve always found Barbie a bit disturbing. I’ve seen “Superstar; The Karen Carpenter Story”, and I’ve seen some amusing, if not inspiring dioramas, starring Barbie, assembled by an artist with a dark sense of humor, but, I’ve never seen Barbie dolls look quite so disquieting, as they did in that shoebox a few weeks ago at the Manilla Community Ctr. Thrift Store. I don’t think that’s a great way to sell Barbie dolls, personally, but whatever. What’s done is done. I guess I’ll shake it off someday.

 

That’s how it is with Barbie. I can’t say she’s unattractive, but everything about her is just a little creepy. Besides the fact that her boobs are too hard and pointy, there’s something just a little psychotic in her facial expression. She’s trying too hard. Barbie always looks phony, and just a little too ambitious. It’s not a good kind of ambition, if there is such a thing.

 

Barbie’s expression says “I know I’m beautiful, and I like to go on dates, but I’m in love with Jesus, and I’m saving myself for marriage.” Or, that she’s a perpetual beauty pageant contestant, trying desperately to convince us that she’s perfect, until that day she killed 14 people in a Starbucks in San Diego. You can see it in her eyes, she’s looking right at you, but doesn’t see you at all. She’s in her own little world, totally focused on trying to live up to her own unrealistic expectations of herself. Who wants to spend their time around that? Not me.

 

I understand that Barbie was originally marketed to middle-aged men of questionable taste, such as myself. Apparently, Barbie dolls, then called “Lili” dolls, clad in only a negligee, became a popular item, sold in bars in Germany in the 50s. Named after a sexy, sassy, buxom young female comic strip character of the same name, “Lili” dolls hung from rear-view mirrors all over Europe. The 50′s era design explains Barbie’s pointy, 18hr, cross-your-heart bra, missile tits, but I still don’t like her.

Original Lili doll

Yes, Mattel really hit pay-dirt when they started marketing this sexy plaything to young girls. You can’t argue with success. My survey of Humboldt thrift stores tells me that Barbie has achieved complete market saturation. If there is a little girl in America who does not have a Barbie, its only because her mom forbade her from having a Barbie. As a result, she will grow up obsessed with Barbies and collect them compulsively.

I’m sure lots of little girls grow up without playing with Barbie dolls, but at least they always knew that Barbie was available to them. Hell, I even played with Barbie, once or twice myself. I seem to vaguely recall helping Barbie drive her Corvette over a cliff at some point in my distant past, and I still want one of those new “Video Barbies”. Have you seen “Video Barbie”?

 

Video Barbie has a video camera in her neck, a TV screen in her back, and a serial port between her legs, so you can upload the video you shoot with Barbie to youtube and facebook with your computer. I’ve made enough documentaries to know that very few people ever get entirely comfortable in front of a video camera. I’m not sure they’d be any more comfortable with a middle-aged man pointing a Barbie doll with a tracheotomy at them, but its worth a shot.

 

That pretty much sums up how I feel about Barbie, but the Bratz dolls are another story all together. I like the Bratz. I really like the Bratz. I mean, I know they are too young for me, and I don’t, like, know their names or anything, but I think they are cute, and not in a fluffy kitty sort of way.

 

Bratz dolls never fail to turn me on. The Bratz dolls aren’t as stacked as Barbie, but they have cute figures, and they like to show off their belly buttons. I don’t think Barbie even has a belly button, but what really gets me about the Bratz dolls, is the way they look at me.

 

I can’t help notice them looking at me. They’re eyes are at least three times as big as their boobs, and they look at me the way real women never do, at least not when I’m rifling through a shelf of stuffed animals at a thrift store. Then I notice the Bratz luscious full pouting lips, almost as wide as their own hips, and I can’t help but think to myself, “I’ll bet these Bratz give memorable Bjs.”

 

So, when I found out that Barbie was suing the Bratz for copyright infringement, I immediately sided with the Bratz. The lawsuit seemed ridiculous to me. Bratz look nothing like Barbie. The Bratz are so much hotter than Barbie, so much cooler than Barbie and so much more appealing than Barbie. How could that bitch even think they were copying her? “She’s just jealous.” I thought.

 

I was shocked and heartbroken when the ruling came down and Barbie won the trial. Apparently, Barbie, or more accurately, Mattel, spent big bucks on the research and development of the Bratz, but because Mattel determined that Bratz dolls were only going to hurt sales of Barbie dolls, Mattel shelved the Bratz project. A Mattel employee, Carter Bryant, who worked on the Bratz project, and obviously became as smitten with them as I am, jumped ship, and started his own toy company, MGA Entertainment, launching the Bratz himself, and going head-to-head with Mattel in the super-sexy teenage doll market. That’s how the Bratz were born, and that’s how the Bratz almost died.

 

After the trial, the judge ordered that all Bratz dolls and toys be removed from store shelves. That didn’t effect thrift stores though. I continued to encounter Bratz in the thrift stores pretty regularly. By the time of the trial, literally billions of units of cheap plastic Bratz crap had spread to every corner of the globe. I know that globes don’t literally have corners, but suffice it to say that enough Bratz products had been manufactured by that point to form a distinct layer of Bratz sediment in the Earths fossil record.

 

When I would see Bratz dolls in the thrift stores during that time, they reminded me of just how corrupt our criminal justice system really is. Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abdul Jamal are still in prison, the drug war continues unabated, and now this. The Bratz became a symbol of injustice and oppression to me. That flawed ruling only made me love the Bratz that much more.

 

Even so, I never wanted to own any of the Bratz dolls. I’m not that kind of guy. I like the way they look, and I like the way they look at me, but I’m not the possessive type. I just like that they are around, and its nice to see them at the thrift store once in a while. I’m not a collector, and I didn’t try to make money off of people’s fond memories of them, as Bratz dolls became more scarce over time. So, I cheered when an appeals court overturned the trial verdict, and ordered Barbie to pay the Bratz $310 million. Last I heard, Bratz had taken 40% of the “fashion doll market” away from Barbie. Woo-hoo!

 

Now, I hope the Bratz crush Barbie once and for all, and if there’s a god in heaven, please don’t ever let me see another shoebox full of naked Barbies ever again. I know that this whole Barbie vs Bratz thing blew over last year, so this is by no means news. I’m excited about the Bratz today because I just bought my very first Bratz electronic toy.

 

I found this Bratz brand, pink and black electronic drum machine, that looks like a giant padded training bra, in the Garberville thrift store for $1. Looking online, couldn’t find any evidence that anyone else has ever circuit-bent this model of toy before, and I could only find one picture of it online, in an Ebay auction, used, for $9.99. I’m eager to explore the untapped potential of this sexy, somewhat rare, Bratz padded drum bra, and I look forward to having the Bratz in my growing circuit-bent orchestra soon.

For sale on Ebay, $9.99

Postscript: Having spent a while looking at pictures of the Bratz in preparation of this post. I have to admit that these mantis faced Bratz creep me out every bit as much as Barbie. I think I may need to see a fashion doll trauma counselor, but I still like my new drum bra.