any circuit benders up in harrrr?

[oscillateur]

Sorry, I meant to answer a few days ago but mi ipad ate my post (broken PC at home...).

For drum machines to bend : the Roland TR-505 and 626 are excellent but they've gotten too expensive recently.
The Boss Dr-220 is very cool. The Yamaha RX series too, though they can sometimes be a pain in the ass to access the PCBs.
And apart from that, any digital drum machine from the 80's (up to early 90's), when samples were stored in big-ass ICs. Focus on connecting points on these ICs together (except the +V input, the one that makes things crash ) and you'll end up with tons of cool things.

[IEatCats]

Back when i had the gear for it i used to take old alarm clocks and pocket speakers and turn them into mics and distortion boxes. Id definitely recommend buying up the cheapest speakers/amplifiers you can find (dollar store stuff) since they produce some pretty cool results im my experience.

[baremountain]

Wow that sounded great! Is that just the standard plastic danelectro pedal? And are you just connecting parts of the circuitboard to other parts? Or is it more complex than that? I will understand if you don't want to explain exactly what your mods are, but any hints would be cool

Hey, sorry I was out for the weekend.
This is the Danelectro BLT slapback. I think they're discontinued, but you can find 'em around. My methodology was 100% hold a wire between two points and if it sounds cool, install a switch. I've got good documentation of what I did for this one, and I'm going to (mostly) replicate it, but in an V2 form on another person's. Should be much more interesting the second time around now that I know what I like and what I don't. My soldering iron that I was using was also useless, but I ordered a new one that doesn't have a big cracked tip that sucks up solder, and that should speed things up.
If you want pics of the exact mods I made, let me know - I can show you via DM, I just don't wanna post a dozen pictures here haha. I should get the FAB Delay in today so I'll see how it compares with a similar set of mods & better soldering technique. Also modding a chorus so that'll be exciting.

[moid]

Thanks for replying! Since I wrote that I discovered that the danelectro slapback delay is discontinued in the UK and they go for more money on Ebay than I'm willing to spend on something I might fry accidentally! (I tried circuit bending a crappy Joyo Chorus pedal last year and that died alas - although it sounded quite interesting until I screwed up). I assume I just need to make sure I don't touch anything that has the direct power going into it. I've got a partially broken old Marshall pedal (Regenerator I think) that I think I might try out to see if I can get some cool noises out of. I've bought a soldering iron with a really thin tip so hopefully that will help getting into tiny places. Thanks for your kind offer of the images, but as it's going to be harder to get a slapback for cheap I'll remember your offer in case I ever get one. If the FAB pedal works out as being something that works well for you, I can get those new here for about £25 so I might consider that... in which case I might ask about that thank you. I will try the marshall first and see if I smell burning! Thanks for the inspiration, and I found some of Simon the Magpie's videos from your page and those are pretty cool too.

[baremountain]

Just bent a Casio MT220. I built this patchbay:

Basically the 2 rows of 10 green points at the top are hooked up to 20 points in the MT220 (I am terrible at photo documentation & didn't think to take a pic of which points, but I chose them over the course of like 15 minutes, so it wasn't anything super deliberate, just points that made cool sounds together. About half of them ended up being drum trigger glitches, so now when I patch up and start the drum machine (if it starts) it sounds like Zach Hill or some shit, just wild polyrhythmic stuff.
The rest of the bay is (L to R, third; fourth; then fifth row): 1K potentiometer, 5K potentiometer, photoresistor; 2x momentary switches; external hookup (so I can attach something I hadn't thought of at the time of developing the patchbay via aligator clips), body contact (the bottom of a lightbulb). On the side of the box I installed a 1/4" TRS jack so I can get a TRS to dual TS cable & port out the stereo image to my audio interface or two different pedal chains (or just use it like a normal TS jack).

For this synth I gotta say the bottom part isn't doing all the magic I'd hoped, but that will come after I spend some more time picking out patches. There are quite a few cool sounds I dialed in, quite a few unuseable sounds, and several that are just wild noise. I also found a cool patch that basically creates a delay for some of the synth voices. The CPU locks up every now and then & I have to wait for a capacitor to discharge before it'll reboot, but DAMN this thing is cool. I'm gonna do my SK-1 with a few more deliberate mods (switchable line-in for the mic input, clock/tuning mods), as that board is much better-documented than the MT220's.
Here's the finished result. You can hear some audio on my Instagram (@EvanGordon - one is posted normally, the other is in my 'story' for another 14 hours or so)

[Confuzzled]

I would love to learn how to make a patch bay. it's probably really easy but I can't wrap my head around it.

[baremountain]

I'll send you a how-to if you want! I'm gonna make another for my workbench, so I might as well just not be a piece of shit and take pics along the way. I am a "measure-nonce, cut thrice" type of dude, so that's why I don't typically take work-in-progress pics, but if there's demand I'll make it happen. It's **suuuper** simple, basically the top 20 points are literally just jacks mounted (they get soldered to whatever you want them to be soldered to), and the bottom rows are just color-paried jacks wired to whatever is between them. But yeah I'll post a full guide to how I built it either here or somewhere else & link it here when I'm done If you're impatient I can DM you instructions sooner

[DRodriguez]

I was bored waiting for the Man with a movie camera thing to bounce and I somehow turned my arion phaser into a rhythmic massive dirty gain boost resulting in rhythmic sonic destruction. But then I messed up some relay or something somewhere, so I need to find out what relay messed with.

[BitchPudding]

Simon the Magpie would probably have some good input here

(edited cause I'm a moron)

[lordgalvar]

Goo input...

I don't want that

[BitchPudding]

Fuck

[frodog]

Whoo, I like that patchbay! Was there another thread like this? Anyway, posting here because I finished my second sketchy-ass (but working for now) bend, on an Ibanez Distortion Charger. So I'm a noob, but it is fun to modify shit. Plan to do that/build more.

As I've done before with my Casio Rapman keyboard, all I did was solder a 3v blue LED between two points. This time I didn't have a switch for it, so it's just hardwired. However, it was a struggle soldering the wires to the points, and I suspect this is because I didn't clean the metal before soldering. Like I said, rookie, but especially with an old circuit board like this I suppose that's a concern? After some cussing and burnt fingers I managed to get the joints reasonably secure, taped them up, and ran the wires around the edge of the board to the LED inside the pedal. Didn't bother to drill a hole for it, but might be cool later if/when I open it up again and do it properly. THE SOUND.. brutally gated squarewave LED clipping? I like it better than before at least. Still lacks bass (would different input caps solve this?) but the EQ works and it's still stereo (I use it first-in-chain, split for parallel fx). No sound clips, sorry, but you can probably imagine the ballpark.

To be honest irt the marked point to the right there, I'm not 100% sure if it ended up being soldered there or the point to the right of it. Initially I thought I had to bridge them, you can kinda see they're connected on the blurry pic, but only one is needed. As for +/-, don't remember.

[frodog]

Yo, sorry for killing this thread... That DS10 mod there even stopped working after a while, so I undid it. However, I went back to the Rapman keyboard now that I have a better iron. Added a little bit of vero with 3x1N914 diodes, wired via a switch between what I think is a leg of its single-sided synth chip and... something else (mystery connector rail). The result was quite entertaining but unpredictable. Switching on the bend either locks up the IC, producing sometimes nothing, or a drone that gets gradually more distorted and crackling, like real nasty, frying components sound... when I turn off the bend, that random drone will still persist but clean. Gotta power off to stop it, no playing along in this mode. Second option - start one of the preset tracks, like the cringey version of "Can't Touch This"... turn the bend on (no sound, just static) and then quickly off, and if you're lucky the beat is now rearranged (or it freezes the present chord). Tempo and even the measure is skewed, sounds are supplanted by those from other presets, all kinds of niceness that makes a totally different version of the preset. Sometimes the keys also function regularly, sometimes only a few are playable and also distorted. If not lucky, the chip will crap out and a restart is necessary, which is most of the time. But I'm pretty happy with this experiment. If nothing else it gives me a one-in-ten chance to hear a sick, wonky, randomly generated '90s casio jam. Didn't take pics but I will probably revisit the Rapman more times. Anyone has one let me know and I'll show you the bends.