Thursday, February 5, 2009

NEW GLITCH KEYBOARD


this keyboard is much like the last one. it basically consists of a keyboard circuit, drum circuit and glitch circuit. this one however is considerably smaller and doesnt have any signal modulation like the last one did. the reason for that is that it was all too confusing. with this new revision, the glitch circuit is very basic, it has a "beep-beep" horn sound switch, a glitch switch, and a reset switch. oh yeah, and a pitch bend. the keyboard circuit in this one is completely different than the others i've done in the past. i took the main chip out of a toy keyboard from the junk pile that played 8 notes and 5 different keyboard sounds. you can choose between piano, dog, cat, frog, or duck. i also added a switch to sync the key-play to the drum machine.
to build, this keyboard was quite the pain in the ass. painting it was a disaster. after a day of cutting, sanding, and gluing the keyboard's body to the way i wanted it, i primed it and let it dry. after a couple days of drying, i painted it with my airbrush. the keys came out nice but the keyboard chasis was a different story. i painted it all red and then painted a really sweet yellow hexagonal pattern over that. it was a great idea and i'll probably use it again someday, but this time it didnt work out. the paint was too heavy and bled under the masking, and the red paind wasnt dry enough so it peeled in place when the masking was removed. i decided to soak it all for a couple of hours and try to scrub off all of the acrylic paint. after 3 hours of getting most of the paint off, i decided to just paint it all orange with krylon fusion. i took it outside and painted one piece and noticed that almost instantly the krylon was disolving the white primer underneath and making big bubbly scales out of it all. at this point i knew i was screwed. i continued painting the rest of the keyboard orange, and with a pair of rubber gloves on i started intentionally smearing the paint arround making big blurs and textures in the paint. i then took it inside and applied some left over hexagon stickers and airbrushed a blak fade overit all. it looked pretty cool in the end. if the colors werent so flat the textures so terrible, i probably would have used it. but i didnt. instead i wallowed for about an hour and went back to my shop and started over from scratch. it only took about an hour and a half to do the second one. i was able to sand and paint it all that night.
yesterday i wired it all up. it took ALL FUCKING DAY. i went out for drinks from 9-11pm and then finished it at about midnight. the hardest part was getting everthing to fit in there when it was closed back up. hopefully this thing will never have to be reopened.

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