As you’re all aware, ladies and gents, I’m a big fan of discovering new sounds. One endeavor in particular that I’m fascinated with is circuit bending which is the act of taking an electronic device and modifying its circuits to produce all sorts of wild sounds. It’s seen as a serious musical pursuit by some, a mere hobby by others and completely fucking annoying by the rest. Me? I love this shit.
So what kind of devices can be circuit bent? Pretty much anything with a circuit and a speaker (or audio output). The most popular objects for bending are kids toys. The combination of nostalgia and the act of warping something that’s supposed to be happy is too much for most benders to pass up. Speak and Spells in particular are very popular as they already produce a variety of sounds. When one manipulates them, it comes out sounding more like Speak and Kill. It’s deliciously evil and frankly, a lot of fun.
Where can you learn more? Well, there are a ton of resources online. Youtube is an obvious place to start. There are a lot of videos that show not only what these instruments do but how to modify them. Getlofi.com is a great resource for everything circuit bent. Bent-Tronics.com is also fantastic. My favorite has to be folktek.com though. They don’t go into too much detail about creating instruments as they’re mostly a retail site, but the instruments that they have for sale border on works of art. They’re expensive, but they are some of the coolest contraptions ever built.
I’m going to get into the craft myself and chronicle my experiences here on The Sammich. I’ll be starting out by purchasing a couple of small items and recording some tunes to decide what I want to do and how I want to do it. So keep an eye out for some posts and videos about circuit bending in the future.
Jeff Higgins is the founder of Groove Sandwich. He mostly wants to get into circuit bending because he’s a Futurama fan. Go Bender.
Now this is some noise!
Posted by: HenryBlazer | 12/06/2011 at 03:54 PM