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…

The designs are almost finished. These badges should be making their way into the online shop quite soon…

Stay tuned!!

Yes, I recently created a Facebook page for those of you who are into that sort of thing.

After much work, Grandpa Studios V3 is finally ready enough to receive a decent general public live testing! Everything seems to be running reasonably stable in Firefox and Safari… Still working on a few abnormalities with every web developers favorite browser; Internet Explorer. Arrgh, I really can’t imagine why anyone would run this browser out of choice with free code like Firefox floating around begging for you to download and install.

If while navigating through the new site you manage to find anything askew, it really would be quite handy if you let me know. Browser details and a screenshot (if it is something visual) would be a plus!

Just a note: the shop is currently only stocked with fake items for testing purposes. You are however more than welcome to buy the nonexistent items listed. I’ll happily take your money and spend it wisely, just don’t expect anything to arrive in the mail.

I really should be spending less time coding and editing images and more time drawing…