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HaywireCurriculum2008

This is a placeholder for me to develop Curriculum for the Haywire 2008 workshop. It's short, outline form.

Intro

Gauge experience levels

- Basic experience...Who can solder?

- Who has done circuit bending before?

Explain format, set expectations

Background

What is circuit bending?

Where did it come from? - Reed's "Alien" philosophy - Anti-theory

How does this differ from "modding"? - Philosophy vs. experience - Aleatoric/chance elements...sometimes it won't work, sometimes it won't be repeatable

Show examples of bent instruments

  • Famous Speak and Spells
  • Incantor
  • SK1

Types of things to bend

Battery powered, respect the electron

  • Kids toys
  • Guitar/effects pedals
  • Halloween props
  • Keyboards

Stay away from (unless you're daring/risky):

  • TVs, microwaves, cars, other deadly items
  • Raw power and stored charge

General classes of bends

  • Line out
  • Feedback/squeal
  • Auto loop points
  • Pitch/clock change
  • Glitch
  • Radio/noise/static
  • Combinations of all of the above
  • Something entirely weird and new!

Techniques

  • Line out (watch the level, trimmed + potted level)

- First thing to do, changes sound completely

  • Feel around with hands

- Often provides general regions of interest - Can be fine-tuned later - Good source of touch/contact points

  • Single point to point shorts (become switches)

- jeweler's screwdrivers or wire and alligator clips - watch out for short to ground/short to power

  • Pot/capacitor/resistor/leds (become switched components)
  • Potted power
  • New bus (Reed's X to X)
  • Crashes

- Switched power for reset

  • Finishing

- Recasing or not

Tips

  • Scratching at traces

- Can be helpful where no pin/solder joint available (but fragile)

  • Always record initial probes/searches
  • Take pictures, scribble notes with software

- Can help others too

  • Stranded wire versus solid core
  • Saving battery holders/switches/LEDs

- Also converting coin cell to AA packs

Hybrids/The Future

  • Where do we go from here?
  • Multi device hybrids
  • Computer controls, simplifying integration
  • Audio/analog control
  • With documentation comes "meta bending"

Questions