Diy on ndr_brt

Twenty Percent: modified drone machine

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 23:05:03 +0200

You know what is a Sony MX-555? Yeah, me neither, before buying one dirt cheap on ebay. There’s not a lot of infos on the web… it’s an hifi mixer with echo included.

I was attracted by the echo thing, and I thought I could bend it, but, you know, probing on a 220V powered device is not a good idea, so, after some cold sweat and shaking hands, I decide to mod it.

CVLT Stylophone Bending (2007 reissue)

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 21:48:38 +0200

What’s a stylophone? It’s a curious instrument from the 60’s, according to wikipedia

It consists of a metal keyboard made of printed circuit board and played by touching it with a stylus—each note being connected to a voltage-controlled oscillator via a different-value resistor—thus closing a circuit.

Got this reissue from an ebay auction together with a Stylophone Beatbox (whose bending will come in the next weeks).

Open it up! Link to heading

There’s no screws, but the bottom is glued to the top and there are 4 plastic clips, 2 each short edge. I used a small flathead screwdriver to separate the two parts, paying attention to avoid clips breaking.

VGA JAM

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 12:54:39 +0100

prologue Link to heading

Some weeks ago, I was struggling because my old 32bit laptop that I use for livecoding performance, is not powerful enough to run the great Hydra visual live coding platform (github), and I need something to give interest to the “visual” part of the performance.

One morning I woke with an intuition: “hey, maybe I could bend the VGA cable to produce some glitches!”.
Googling around I met CHA/V but was too complicated: buy stuff, build stuff… I just wanted to bend! My attention went captured by the works of James Connolly and his tutorials to bend audio into VGA cable and video into audio from VGA. CRAZY!