Electronic Anarchists

Circuit bending is the process of modifying electronic musical toys or old cheap keyboards to make new deconstructed sounds. The way this is done is by shorting out the sound chip in experimental ways to change the way the sound is produced. This can be great fun and you don't need to be electronically minded to do it. I recently bought a Texas Instruments Speak & Spell off eBay. It was sold as not working so it was very cheap. If you have a multimeter it is very easy to trace the problem. Almost always these toys have had the wrong polarity adapter plugged in to them. This tends to blow a transistor and you can normally feel one or two over heating, this often smells. Be careful when feeling them as they get very hot. When they blow they short out the power to the toy and it wont power up at all. You have to replace the transistors to prevent more damage. I got this Speak & Spell working by this process and soon I will circuit bend it to create a new musical instrument. If you search on eBay for circuit bent toys you will find many selling at ridiculous prices. Just get yourself a soldering iron and a cheap multimeter and look on the Internet for instructions on testing components. You can do it yourself you don't need to be an expert.

A few years ago I picked up a cheap Yamaha RX21 drum machine. It's from the early 1980s and sounds very dated, I don't think even Kraftwerk would bother with one. I decided to circuit bend it by adding a potentiometer and a few switches to the sound chip and it sounds fantastic now. It's totally changed the sound and it is very usable now. The photos below show the added switches and pot.

Artists like Beck have used modified Speak & Spells and circuit bent Casio keyboards live on stage. It is a great way to create brand new sounds. I will post some samples of circuit bent sounds soon.