Howdy, I have been a bit of a ghost round these parts lately and thought you may like to know why. One of the many reasons is I have been buried in collecting equipment and parts to modify and “circuit bend“. Circuit bending is basically the art of short circuiting. You open up toys, music equipment, anything that makes a sound really (although I wouldn’t advise people to go poking around AC powered devices) and add switches, resistors, capacitors, cut trace lines and feed the electrons through alternate paths on the board to change the sound. Here is a closer look at some of my favourites:

Casio’s famous SK1 keyboard. I actually own two of these and am pretty excited about bending both of them. I’ve been hard at work carefully planing everything I will do to their insides and outsides…

Synsonics – Mattel’s analog drum machine. I’m adding sound controls and will re-case the whole unit.

Children’s voice changer megaphone. I bent this a while back but since then it has suffered a fall. I should probably re-case it, as gaffer-tape ghetto is not really the look I am going for. I have a few more circuit tweaks planned for it too.

Yamaha RX-17 drum machine. Going to add a modular style banana plug patch bay to this one.

Toy piano with a piezo pick-up I added. The pick-up was installed years ago. Since then I have collected a few more that will get the same treatment and maybe tone controls as well.

You may be pleased to hear that I have also been working on some new drawings…