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Making First Connections

Lesson 10 from: Circuit Bending: Making Music By Rewiring Toys and Devices

J. Anthony Allen

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Lesson Info

10. Making First Connections

Lesson Info

Making First Connections

Okay, So now we've got our jumper wire here, and we've got a circuit board so exposed. So the next thing we need to do is just make some sounds and see what happens. So the first thing I'm gonna do is put the batteries back in. So being very careful because you can easily break something here. Remember, the key is to not let anything get disconnected. Okay, Batteries, air back in now. I need to figure out how to turn it on. I'm pretty sure this is the on switch. I could also flip it up. Here we go. Now it's on. I can play it by doing that. Now, this is where that demo mode is gonna come in handy. So fucking figure out how to turn that on by looking at it upside down. There it is. Okay, now, this is the worst part about circuit bending. Is that you're gonna have to hear this little song over and over and over. But let's try to bend some stuff, Okay? Hopefully you can see that. So I'm just gonna pick a point and I'm gonna two points. I'm gonna connect him. I'm gonna hear what happens did...

my demo run out? I was hoping that it looped. That means that every few minutes I'm gonna have to go back and hit this button. All right, Here we go again. Let's connect that. So now I'm just holding down one point, hitting a few different things. Okay, these two short. So when I connect these two points, it shuts down. I shorted it out. It is Okay. I just got to restart it. Ah, and then not hit that again. So we're gonna make a special note of that in a minute. I'll show you how to do that. Now, a lot of the time, what I'm looking for is a group of stuff. Like, I think there's good stuff here. So I'm gonna stick to the same point on the left and tried over here. Oh, I got another short. So I think the short probably is coming from there. We don't like that one. All right, one more time. Let's try one of these. There we go. OK, I stopped the thing, but I didn't short it, so that was interesting. Try these two. No, I keep shorting it out over here, and I get anything there? Okay. I didn't short it out. He just ran out on the song. I am triggering stuff now. Okay, so I think this section is responsible for triggering stuff. Not necessarily the sounds, though. Gonna short. Tricky. Okay, I have a theory. Stop this. So my theory is all of this stuff. Most of this stuff is controlling the patches and the notes and the actual sounds that we want to get at is underneath this. So I'm gonna try to pull this off and see if I can get to it. Okay, I got that flipped over, and here's what I discovered. So I was right. There was another circuit board under there on the question is, are my sounds in here, or is this more control information which I'm very curious about because it doesn't I don't see a chip that I was expecting, but let's goof around with it and see what we confined. So now I have a little bit more complicated thing because all my buttons now are gone. I mean, this whole piece of plastic is gone, so if I want to turn it on, I gotta figure out how to do that. I'm pretty sure that's the switch right here. There it is. Now, where was that demo mode? It was one of these two. Nope. There it is. Not See what we find. Okay, I found a way to short it. Okay, Well, I found a way to trigger that snare drum. Could do that right there. Okay, so I've been playing around with this now I shut the camera off, so you didn't need to watch me and just goof around with that, But I was basically just testing all kinds of stuff. Um, just throwing these two wires all over this wire all over the place and listened. What happened? I didn't want to subject you to listening to that little tune several 100 times, which is what I just did. Um, but I think I found a couple of interesting things. They tend to be, ah, between this region right here and this region here. Now, this region. I had a clue, because if I flip this over, so ah ah, unit like this, that has a lot of sounds in it is probably it. Most of those sounds are probably stored on a chip. So if I look around here, I don't really see a chip. Chip is like a big black thing. Kind of looks like an eraser from a pencil. But if I flip this over, look on the other side. Don't really see a chip that's not a champ. I hope you can see that That looks like a like a pencil eraser, but it's not. That is a chip, so that's probably where the sounds are. So if I follow that to the other side, that gets me these eight sauder points. So those are probably where the sounds are. Um, from there. I just started experimenting, and I think my favorite sounds. Here we go again. Down and Anna are between C. I think it was this one here, and that's kill. There's a couple good ones that around here it's kind of a cool one when the sound is happening. There was actually some pretty cool, really gnarly distortion, this one even better one here somewhere. Like that's my favorite one. Because also remember that we're only hearing this demo play. But some of these bends will affect the keys differently. Um, different sounds differently. Um, so ah, these sounds that I'm finding tend to be these big distorted tones, Um, which I'm kind of cool with. If we kept poke around long enough, we could probably find some other interesting stuff. But I'm pretty happy with that. Now, the next thing we need to dio once we kind of know what area we're looking for. Ways we need to do a little bit of planning because the next thing we need to do is is going to be sauntering, and we kind of only get one shot at that. I mean, we can unsought er, that's a thing, But it's hard. So Ah, what I'm gonna do is figure out how to make a map of what's happening and from that map will be able to plan Arbenz well. So in the next video

Ratings and Reviews

Karolina Kaminska
 

I am a complete beginner to this topic and I enjoyed watching the free live stream of this course. It taught me enough to get started with some ideas, although I anticipate I'll have to follow up with other YouTube videos to ensure I understand enough for different kinds of toys and techniques. Thanks!

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