22, or “Super”

This here is a very unique item, which I have named "super", only cause it was the most available word for gluing. It is super though. I did construct it, if my memory serves, from a radio, and a voice changer, plus some knobs, and switches, and audio jacks.

You have a switch that turns on the whole thing-a-ma-jig, located on the left of the machine, below the first audio jack, which just happens to be an input. There are also two more switches. Both have different effects when switched on, or off, or even vice versa. In the right top corner you will find the second audio jack (both are 1/8th inch, by the way) and that one can be used as your output, but I'm not the boss of you, so you go ahead and do whatever feels right with it.

Now the interesting part: the knobs. Those knobs are really where the whole thing comes together. Without them, this thing would only be mildly amusing, instead of super... amusing. Turn 'em any which way, and you'll be pitched up, down, right, left, and through dimensions you are too afraid to even question the existence of. Just make sure that once you feel a moderate amount of resistance, you quit turning the knob, cause you might break it.

This piece can generate it's own tones, distort them, and you can pitch them up and down. It can also have other signals fed through it, as evidenced in the videos I will post links to. In all seriousness, it is a good little sound maker, which can be sampled from, or played through your other synths, or played straight.

hey

Just sold this and thought I would give an overview of its operation. It is fair to say that there is very little information that I could give which would make a person completely able to play it right off the bat. A good amount of experimentation will be required.

At the right you can see the switch which was previously hidden under a sticker. The switch has three settings which simply change the distortion.





If one wanted, one could use the machine to apply an effect to, say, a guitar or other signal passed through it. To do so you would just flip the top switch, turning on the "modulation" circuit, and plug your external signal source into the input.






If you wanted to hear the sounds the machine can make on it's own flip all the switches, as pictured.

The battery packs:

How to operate #11

Here is the manual for the assembly and operation of my eleventh instrument.

In the picture below, we can see the brackets on the back of the ca-110 to which the smaller keyboard will be attached















Here the ca-110 is preparing it self to recieve the smaller keyboard.















Unfortunately the camera didn't focus the way I hoped it would, but here are the bolts which will be placed inside the brackets, on the back of the ca-110.














When the ca-110 brackets are fitted over the smaller keyboards bolts, there will be no room to place your nut onto the smaller keyboards bolt. For that reason you can see I am holding the ca-110 up while I place, and turn the nut a few times.















Below is the hole which will receive the bolt for the control box. With the ca-110 held upside-down, it will be to the right of the smaller keyboard.















The bracket on the control box:















First connect the control box to the smaller keyboard; it should be obvious how to do so.















Place the bolt through the hole, form the back, so the nut will be tightened against the control box bracket.















Nextly, find the wire which ought to be protruding from the underside of the ca-110, and attach it to the connector closest to the yellow portion of the control box, like so:















Finally attach the voice changer to the only available connector. It will only go in one way.















Next I will explain the control box:















First the color scheme. The green controls belong to the smaller keyboard. The black belong to the voice changer, and the yellow controls the ca-110.

Knobs, such as greens 1a, correspond to a switch, so to use knob 1a you must flip switch 1.

The toggle switches are on/off/(on), which means one side of the switch is momentary. Flip any switch down and it will stay on, flip it up and it will momentarily stay on. This will not matter though, as no bends were attached to the up position of any switch, or no important bends that is.

The yellow controls are momentary push buttons, ad are not meant to be held down, though holding them down may garner results.

Now for what they actually do.

Green:
1:
Activates pitch and distortion bends which are controlled by the knobs 1a, and 1b simultaneously. Unfortunately these bends work best when not amplified, that is to say, when fed through the smaller keyboards speaker. The bends can be random, and two knobs are necessary to fine tune, and control them.
(If you don't want to amplify this bend, but still want to use the voice changer to add distortion, you could mic the smaller keyboard's speaker, and then feed the output of your computer/amp, into the voice changer, and out again)

2:
Distortion

3:
Activates a sustained tone. You can change the tone by pressing a key twice. Different bends from the voice box, and the smaller keyboard can be layered on top to create pretty interesting effects.

4:Distortion

Black:
Black controls correspond to the voice box, as stated earlier. The voice box itself has three settings, alien, monster, and amplify. The three black controls will work with the voice box set to any of its own settings.

1:
I believe this activates a tone, just as green 3 does.

2:
Pitch, to be controlled by knob 2a

3:
Distortion

Yellow:

1,2,3:
Random glitches. Use demo mode or select a beat, and then press a button quickly. They can easily crash the ca-110, but pressing repeatedly can bring it back to life. If not turn the ca-110 off, and then back on. Using these buttons will be trial and error.

Now to explain the wiring:


















The outputs, and inputs, are marked on the ca-110, and the smaller keyboard, but not on the voice box. The left side, as pictured above, has two inputs, 1, an 1/8" inch, and 2, a 1/4". The right side has two out puts, 3, 1/8", and 4, 1/4".

To use the keyboards with the voice box (anything that has an output which is, or can be adapted to, 1/8" or 1/4" can be used with the voice box; this includes guitar, and microphone.) simply plug the outputs from both into the inputs of the voice box, and then choose which voice box output you'd like to use, and plug that into your computer, or amp, or whatever.

I have been working on this project for a long time, and because of that I tend to worry about how good it is, but soon Dylan will share with us all how well it works.

Robusto, #12

If you would like to trade some cash for this, click here.

I finished the technical aspects of this piece a while ago, but just recently put the finishing touches on it. It functions rather well, and is capable of a lot.

I am sort of at a loss on how to describe it. It is the first non toy(though I did make it from a toy) I have made. I used some on/off/momentary toggle switches. The bottom right switch turns it on, or plays a tone rather. The down position is the permanent one, and plays a high tone, while pushing it up will play the low tone momentarily.

The knobs all do strange things including some distortion, and pitch stuff. Its best to watch the video to see how it all works:



It has two momentary switches, one which acts just as the high tone toggle switch does, and the other activates some distortion, which is fed through a capacitor, so it sounds pretty weird.

It also has a body contact which adds rather random effects, though generally just pitch. If you can get the setting just right, it will even act as an antenna, and you can control pitch without even touching it, sort of like a theremin.

It has a speaker, and an 1/8" audio output, and it is all cased within a cigar box.

#10 Y'all

Click here if you want to practice ownership.

Yeah I just finished it. I actually did most of the work, and put it back together yesterday, but then realized I hadn't put in an output. I used up all my 1/8" jacks, so I put in an rca, or composite, or whatever, out.

It is operated entirely by five body contacts. When you toch them in combination, you get many pitch, and distortion bends.

I mistakenly bought it without realizing the one who operates it might be grateful for a battery cover. You can see my ingenious solution in the second picture. It's a good thing I never throw any useful thing away.

As an interesting aside; the screws which secure the batteries came from a computer desk which I burned a few months ago. It was the kind that had some shelves inside of a cabinet on top. To digress from my aside, I had earlier removed one of the shelves to paint a picture of my mothers dog on it. Back to my original tangent, when I decided to burn it (not because of some dangerous defect in my personality, but because it is the easiest way to get rid of large wooden trash in the country), I didn't want to take the whole thing apart, so in a impressive feat of strength I heaved the thing over my head and threw it some distance. It broke into many, easily incinerated pieces, and I, consequently, hurt my back. You may be asking yourself, "if you broke it so you wouldn't have to take it apart, how did you get the screws?". To that I say, mind your own business.

A sound sample:



What I did to it:

1) Added five body contacts
2) Added an rca output.

number 5

Have you ever thought to yourself, "Man; I wish I could see and/or buy The Preposterous Man's fifth bent keyboard"? Well today is your lucky day. (It's sold, so it might not be your lucky day)

This one is controlled entirely through what some call "body contacts", but is more accurately described as bolts, in this case. But sure does make some neato sounds:

(It may get boring, but I saved the best for last, so listen all the way through)



You see, you place your fingers on the bolts, which are attached to wires, which are attached to contact points on the circuit board. Your body conducts electricity, with a high resistance, thus creating some of the wackiest sounds ever heard.

The good news is that I got this one to make the cool sound number three made, but it can be reproduced, and controlled to an extent, with this instrument.

What did I add?:

1) Four bolts
2) One hex screw
3) one 1/8" output (It's sort of noisy, but it was the same with the other one of these I had)

bend4

If you are real keen on buying this sucker, click here.

I made this one yesterday, and took some pictures of me doing it as well.

The only bend this one has is pitch, but not normal pitch. As you turn the knob, and the frequency gets lower and lower, the sounds start to break down into a jumble of rhythmic squeaks, tones, and a million other sounds.

The reason why I didn't post it yesterday, when I made it, was I didn't know how to record all of the sounds it made. I still don't; so what I did was record a few interesting sounds, and in the future, I might post more.

Good thing about this keyboard is that it has a volume control, which just limits the volts. When the bend is activated this lowers the pitch even more.



What I did:

1) Added a switch to activate the bend

2) Added a knob (potentiometer) to control the bend (pitch)

3) Rewired the 1/8" input (did virtually nothing as designed) to be an output, for sampling, or amplifying.

Sounds:

Volume button:


Snare drum:


Symbol:

keyboard number 2

Want to buy?

All the samples are at the bottom. Listen to the last one, it shows off what this keyboard can really do.

This little keyboard is my second bend. It is pretty crudely built, but is solid, and works pretty great. I added three switches, and a variable control knob, which activate, and control, about six or seven bends. Its hard to keep count, because I wired it so you could have different switch combinations do different things. I have mapped out all known bends, and will include a "manual"(one sheet of paper) of switch combo's. Here are the functions I added to it:

1) fast
2) slow
3) normal, which fades into another slow, when the knob is turned
4) synth instrument 1, a and b
5) synth instrument 2, a and b
6) pause

The knob can control all of the bends to some degree. Due to the way I built it the sounds that the synth instrument settings produce will change as the machine warms up. You can get a lot of weird sounds out of this.

I have also included an eighth inch output jack, which is in stereo (mono on both channels), for sampling. It is sort of noisy, and I did some noise reduction on the samples, although I think I was recording at too high a volume anyway.

Its also got about 14 (the number of white keys) songs on the demo feature, but they may not all be available with certain bends activated, I didn't test that. I don't really know what else people want to know about circuit bent stuff, so if I have left anything out, please ask.