noystoise

UH YEAR

2012-01-16T22:43:00.000-08:00

wow. this is definitely the longest project i have worked on to date. i began this commission shortly after the "Hartman Mod Job" last february. i was contacted by a guy who was interested in having me build a synthesizer for him that looked like one of Dan McPharlin's miniatures. it sounded like fun and there were some new applications that i was anxious to try out so i agreed. the initial idea was to build a mini synthesizer with a detachable keyboard and as many controls and effects as i could fit. i decided to be courageous and model the toy synth on the notoriously stubborn yamaha pss-30.

i quickly got to work reverse engineering the main board and taking some dimensions. i made a few rough sketches and headed over to my stepdad's place. he has a wood shop and agreed to help me build the cabinet for the synth. i brought some fancy hobby wood from home depot that he laughed at. he quickly whipped out a set of cabinets for the synth that i was extremely excited about. i guess i figured that this project was going to be easy... the idea was to build wooden cabinets for the electronics and upholster them in some powder blue tolex i had ordered. i had never applied tolex before but i was confident that i knew what i was doing after reading tutorials and online forums on the subject. however, nothing could prepare me for the giant sticky mess that is tolex. i followed all of the instructions from the tutorial and the directions on the back of the glue and that stuff is wrong! i wont go in to detail on what works because that's what all those other people did, and i thought that their knowledge would work for me but it didn't. basically, if you are going to try tolex, the only thing you need to know is that its going to be a sticky mess the first time, so don't wear your church clothes. it did work eventually though and i got the tolex to stick to the wood. the only problem was that when i trimmed the tolex around the edges, there was a pretty noticeable seam. the was due in part to the fact that the tolex i ordered was powder blue, which is very revealing of imperfections. i guess that's why it was on sale. i figured i would just find something to cover it up since everyone i showed it to seemed to think it was too noticeable too. but i would cross that bridge when i got to it.

the yamaha pss-30 has quite the reputation for being extremely difficult to modify because it's circuitry is so well consolidated. it is nearly impossible to interrupt any of the keyboards functionality without rendering it useless... this little keyboard caused me a lot of grief but in the end i was able to tame the little bastard. some things to consider when modifying a pss-30; first of all there is a battery alarm tone that goes off something like every 90 seconds if the keyboard is not being played. overcoming this problem easily consumed a month of my time. though now that the issue is resolved i feel like the resolve was pretty obvious. in the end i had to devise a circuit that would continuously pulse a redundant function while the keyboard was not being played in order to reset the battery alarm timer. in doing this, i had to sacrifice the record and playback functions that the keyboard had, and whats worst, i had to sacrifice the rhythms too. i did have a plan to create a different circuit. in which case i would have been able to utilize the rhythms and be able to disable the drum circuit. however, i soon found that the little bastard keyboard had another trick in store for me. the keyboard's chip has two analogue audio outputs. one for the melody and one for the rhythms. however, the two separate channels have bleed through, and the signals can be heard through the others' respective channel. this was not acceptable because like most of my synth circuits these days, the melody voice runs through a frequency divider to generate sub-octaves. when the sound of snare hiss runs through the divider, the output is something like a crackling pop sound and it sucks! i had planned to add a step sequencer to the keyboard anyway, and since the melody section and the rhythm section are on the same clock, it would have been hard to make any sense out of the rhythms constantly pitching up and down. i decided to add a separate drum circuit. i had a couple of these cheap drum machine key-chains that had some pretty nice drum samples in them. i figured i would build a crazy rhythm generator that triggered the sounds, and mix that with the sounds of the pss-30. i found this schematic somewhere that used the cd4089 binary rate multiplier as a pattern generator. i figured i would use those to trigger the drum sounds through a web of dividers and synced to the step sequencer's clock. i built it all and it sounded great. i have to say though, it was kind of odd to hear clean realistic drum sounds against the shredding sub-octaves from the pss-30. i went to work on the filter section of the pss-30. rather than using the usual noisy op-amp filters i usually use, i decided to give the lm13700 VCF a try. it was a little more work but i must say, the sound is way better then any other filter ive built. i figured out a sneaky way to steal a little current from the key matrix of the pss-30 and turn it into a trigger without disturbing the functionality of the keyboard. i used that signal to trigger the envelope generator that modulates the cutt-off of the filter. now that the synth is finished, i do regret not putting in a more sophisticated envelope generator. it works but its range is low. oh well, its great at what it does. next i built the step sequencer. in the past i have always used the cd4017 chip for sequencers but this time i wanted to have the ability to run the sequencer up or down, so i drew something up using the 74hc193 counter and the a cd4051 analogue switch. it turned out great! i could run the sequencer in both directions and i was able to do other things too. i added a feature that would hold the last step in the sequence until the the keyboard is inactive, and i added another feature that gates the sequencer from the first step every time a key is pressed. i even added a rotary encoder circuit to be able to jog up and down in "program" mode to individually tune each step or to just transpose the keyboard quickly. i gave the sequencer its own cd4089 pattern generator and moved on to incorporating the melody and rhythm circuits together. ok, so reading back a bit i realize that i have not mentioned how long i have been working on this project and how many shitty and/or distracting things have happened to me. by this time in the project i am going to say that it is probably around july... anyway, so i am going back to the drum circuit in all its glory and i want to put all these circuits together. unfortunately the drum circuit doesnt work any more. after spending a week or two trying to figure out why it suddenly doesnt work any more and replacing everything including the drum circuit its self, i came to the conclusion that it was totally fucked. i was left with a big hunk of circuits and two fried drum toys. not a problem. by this point im so fucking jaded that it doesnt even bother me. and for some reason the dude who i am building this for is not bothered that i have spent six months on this shit and there is no end in sight! sweet... all the while i am thinking of all the other stuff i'd rather be building. so i take a little break and do a rebuild of one of my older projects that i sold to another guy some years ago. more details in the previous post.

(dead drum)

after a much needed break from this project, i came back refreshed and decided to use an analogue drum sound generator. why not? it would sound great with the pss-30. i grabbed a little KoolShades drum machine from the basement and reverse engineered it. i decided that each of the four drum sounds should have its own pattern generator, pattern divider, volume control, and accent control. on top of that there is a pattern reset switch for each of the pattern generators to be able to sync or de-synchronize patterns from each other. there is also one "all" reset switch that resets all of the five patterns at once. it came together really well. by this time in the project i was unstoppable. if an issue came up, i knew what the problem was without even looking at it, and before i knew it, the circuit was built.

now i had to think about the case. after the mess with the cabinet and the tolex i was just not satisfied with the edges of the case. i figured i would find some kind of decorative edging to cover the seams of my amateur upholstery job, but when i hit up google i was left disappointed. now i really must say that this was definitely the most emotional part of the project. i could not for the life of me find anything remotely close to what i was looking for for a whole month! and its all i did for the whole month too! i was consumed. all i wanted was some of that cheap shiny edging that you see everywhere on everything... why couldn't i find it? what is it even called? after a month of wasted hours of google searching and bad dreams about it all, i finally found this thin steel tape that is apparently used for tagging machine parts in big dirty shops. the stuff is crazy durable and polished, and very flexible. this would have to do.

next up; faceplate. designing the faceplate and the whole interface was really fun and pretty easy. i sent my design to pololu to have them cut it like i have before in the past, and began work on designing my graphics. when the faceplate came, it was opposite the direction i needed it so they sent me another one no charge. sweet! now i have two.

sad to say though i probably wont send any more designs their way since i have a laser of my own now. now that i had the right faceplate i needed to think about how i would apply my graphics. for some reason i thought that vinyl was an option. hahaw. no, vinyl was no option. i then started looking in to companies that offered dry transfer services but that shit is offensively expensive. after wasting more time on dead ends and being offended by returned quotes, i landed on screen printing. i had never screen printed anything before but how hard could it be to screen print 12" by 12" of 8pt text on a smooth surface? well, its pretty fucking hard. i bought all the stuff and did some trials and after being totally frustrated by it all, decided to just go for it. the result was actually way better than i would have expected. there are a lot of fat smudgy parts, but all in all it passes.

at this point in the project i was pretty distracted with traveling to new cool places with my GF so it was kind of slow to wrap up. i gave the project a few hours of my day each day before work and a little more on my days off. once the wretched holidays were over i put it all together like a puzzle. and so here we are. almost a year later and i'm left with a big beautiful symbol of the last year of my life that i cant remember very well. check out the demo video for more details. as always, click on the pictures for larger sizes.

CIRCUIT BENT GLITCH SYNTH REVISED

2012-01-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

this will be a quick write up on a project i finished a while ago. i've been meaning to post this for a while but have been preoccupied with other things. this project came to me while i was working on a much larger project. i needed a break from the larger project and a piece i had sold someone a long time ago had fallen on hard times. the guy i had sold the keyboard to has bought many things from me over the years. he contacted me to let me know that the glitch circuit in the keyboard was no longer working. he asked if i could fix it and i agreed. the keyboard was a glitch toy that i had built in 2008 and sold on ebay. more details here.

(this is a photo of the original mod)

upon receiving the keyboard in the mail, i was pretty stoked to see one of my earlier creations again. i couldn't believe how long it took me to build that piece of junk. the functions were silly! i opened it up to have a look at the glitch circuit. it was dead. i don't really know how or why but it isn't the first time that i've seen a glitch circuit just stop glitching. the glitch chip that i used in the keyboard came from this funny toy that had great sounds and produced very unique glitch sequences. and quite a few more types of glitches than your standard 3 volt glitch toy. it was hard to accept that it would not glitch ever again, but i did have an alternative. the yellow toy steering wheel that i have used in so many of my other glitch toys is usually the easiest to find of 3 volt glitch toys and in my opinion the most consistent. the fix would be simple. i would replace the glitch circuit, send the keyboard back, and get back to the torture of my other big project... only problem was that by replacing the glitch circuit, most of the buttons and some other functions on the keyboard would be rendered useless. not only that but i was kind of appalled by the wiring of the whole thing. i offered the owner a deal he couldn't refuse. i would completely overhaul the whole thing for the cost of materials. he agreed and i had something new to distract me from the frustration of my other project. the first thing i did was completely gut everything.

i began developing a new circuit based on one that i had prototyped a while back. basically a glitch circuit that does not require the user to activate a sound, then glitch it, and then reset it when it locks up. it is basically a step sequencer that is activated with the push of a button. when held, the sequence will start by activating a sound, then glitching the sound, and after a second or two will reset the glitch circuit and start the sequence over. this makes it easier to find the glitch you are looking for. all you have to do is hold down the glitch button until you hear the glitches that you like.

that easy button freed up a lot of space on the control panel for other things so i decided to run the glitch generator through a frequency divider and have three independent channels each with their own volume control and resonant filter. there is also a clean mix that is a volume control for the original glitch signal. the third sub-octave channel also has a six-position switch that can select one of six sub-octaves. the lowest of which is more or less a clicker. the output of the divide channels is substantially fuzzy because the signal needs to be "squared up" before it can be divided, so the sub-octaves are quite a bit harsher than the original signal. i also added a switch to send the piano sounds into the divider to be mixed with the glitch signal before it is divided or to be divided by itself and mixed back together. there is a switch to mix the original piano signal with the sub-octaves or mix the sub-octaves alone without the original signal.

(hardware mock up)

(hardware mounted)

(all wired up)

there is also a guitar input to the divider, however the original signal from the guitar input can not be mixed in. all three inputs(glitch, piano, guitar) are mixed together prior to dividing so some really complex noise textures can be achieved when the three are playing together. the modulation is all the same except i completely rebuilt the two LFO's. they originally had been pretty limited in range. i rewired all of the hardware and gave the piece some nicer knobs too. see the manual i made for more details on the modulation.

that's about it...

HARTMAN ENVELOPE FILTER MOD JOB

2011-02-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

this is a commission i took on about a month and a half ago. the idea was simple really. a friend of a friend wanted to add an expression pedal to his Hartman envelope filter. after doing some quick research on the Hartman, i found that it is a clone of the famous mutronIII pedal. rather than just agreeing to add a simple expression pedal to open and close the filter, i suggested that he(the owner) have me add as many mods as possible. i suggested adding the three missing filter modes highpass, bandpass and notch filter outs. i also suggested adding attack/release controls for the envelope, and a multi-shape lfo to modulate the filter. i gave the owner a pretty reasonable quote for the commission and he agreed to go for it. initially i thought that this project would not take more than a couple of weeks to finish. as always, i was sorely mistaken. first of all drawing out the schematic alone took an entire day. the pcb is double sided. i thought it would be identical to the mutronIII schematic, and later i found that for the most part it was, but the way the circuit was laid out, the only thing i could recognize was the filter. i had to redraw the rest of the circuit point to point only to find that the envelope generator was the same too. the only thing Hartman seemed to add was a mixing buffer to be able to mix between dry and wet, and some kind of power conditioner that i don't fully understand. see my original drawing for more into that...

another issue i had with the Hartman circuit is that it just seemed to be very cheaply constructed. apparently this particular model was a prototype. it had numerous extra parts and wires that went nowhere or were redundant. i thought that was kind of cool. i however didn't think it was very cool that the solder used in this thing seemed to be either lead free or flux free. either way, that shit was awful. it was all dry and crusty and it would "infect" any fresh solder i would add. another thing was that the traces on the pcb were extremely thin and fragile. they could be scratched right off with no effort. the wires coming off of the pcb to the hardware broke and had to be reattached so many time that eventually i just replaced the worst ones with solid copper wire. despite all my gripes with having to work around someone Else's work, the circuit sounded pretty great. i came up with a plan that i thought might work, and drew up a schematic for the mods that would be added. i picked up this vco chip years ago and I've been meaning to use it. its called the icl8038 and from what i understood, it is a pretty nice function generator chip with sine, pulse,and ramp outs. i thought it might be cool to be able to modulate the filter with the lfo and then use the envelope from the Hartman to modulate the depth, rate or duty ratio of the oscillator, as well as being able to control all of those parameters in addition to the wah filter via the expression pedal. i had planned to put all of the additional circuitry in the expression pedal itself. in order to get those 16 connections that i would need from the expression pedal to the Hartman, i would need my old friend the MDR cable. fortunately too i was actually able to find one at goodwill for only $5. the only catch was that it was attached to a floppy disk drive. an MDR cable is a Mini D Ribbon cable and they are awesome! they can carry as many as 40 leads and they have these wonderful squeeze-lock connectors that are super strong. i would love to know where i can find more of these. i found them on mouser but they are non-stocked. they are super rare to find in thrift stores too. everything is usb now so the old floppy drives that employed them are probably all off to the recycling. if you know where to find MDR cables with the quick release connectors, please let me know.

one thought that crossed my mind is that in order to reroute mods from the Hartman to the expression pedal, the original functions would be disabled when the expression pedal is disconnected from the hartman. i came up with a plan to have all of the mods switched to the the expression pedal through a cd4066 digital switch that would activate when the connector is in. it was a pretty slick feature. unplugged the Hartman would be stock, plugged in, the expression pedal would take over. sadly though, one of the leads that the 4066 was responsible for switching was the -9volts which the 4066 didn't appreciate very much seeing as how it was running off +9 and ground, and it died on me. i considered running the 4066 off ground and -9, but the input for the switch was the ground. i figured no matter what solution i came up with to be able to use 4066, it would inevitably die anyway. they always do. so i ripped out all my work and replaced it with 4 pole switch. its not nearly as slick, but just in case something awful happens to the exp. pedal rendering it useless, the Hartman can still be used as it was originally intended.

coming into this project i have to say, i didn't know that much about Vactrols. the Hartman filter is modulated via matched vactrols. vactrols are basically an led stuck to a light dependent resistor encapsulated in a light proof box. the more light, the less resistance. i picked up quite a few vactrols for a good deal a while back and i thought i would use them for this project. in my original schematic i had planned to to implement all of my mods with their own respective vactrols. i soon found that not all vactrols are the same. all vacrtols exhibit some latency, even the fastest ones. the vactrols take noticeable amount of time to peak and disengage when the current to the led is cut off. the vactrols in the Hartman are pretty fast but the vactrols i have are painfully slow to disengage. i had to go back and reconfigure my schematic to use only the vactrols already in the Hartman to modulate the filter with the expression pedal and lfo. the other vactrols and optoisolators i used for modulating the lfo parameters are not as important as the response from the lfo or pedal to the Hartman filter. although the lfo modulates the filter via the original vactrols, they still exhibit latency too. i noticed that at higher lfo frequencies the filter would stay closed because the vactrols wouldn't have enough time to disengage. and the frequencies weren't even that high... i had no choice but to literally rectify the situation. the vactrol cathodes go to ground and not -9 volts. this is how it has to be in order to be able to invert the envelope with the direction switch. the signal from the lfo would have to be half wave rectified. i tried to run the lfo off of 9v and ground but it wouldn't oscillate. below is a diagram of whats coming out of the lfo(left), and what is modulating the filter(right). those shapes are probably distorted too because of the latency of the vactrols(i can only assume without plugging it into an oscope).

so yeah, the wave shape names on the side of the expression pedal are totally false but still quite usable. who knows, maybe the solution will come to me before i ship it out on monday. oh yeah, did i mention that the icl8038 didn't work out? yeah, that was supposed to be before all the vactrol nonsense. so the icl8083 is basically a piece of shit that is worthless in more ways then i care to mention... actually its not that bad. I'll just never use one for anything. instead i found this super simple tri-shape lfo schematic built around a quad op-amp. it works great and i am sure i will be using it much more in the future.

ok, where am i going with this? i guess now is where i describe the finished pedal. i painted the base of the roland EV-5 pedal orange and applied white lettering for the parameter labels. i then finished it with clear lacquer.

the PED switch assigns the expression pedal to the lfo rate, lfo depth, filter or off. the MODE switch selects the filter type highpass, bandpass, lowpass, or notchpass. the silver knob sets the maximum depth of the expression pedal.

the ENV switch assigns the Hartman envelope to the lfo rate, lfo depth, filter or off. the the LFO switch selects ramp, square,sine, or none waveshapes. the toggle switch under the expression pedal switches between stock Hartman envelope and custom envelope. the two pots control the attack and release of the custom envelope when engaged.

the DEPTH and RATE knobs control depth and rate or initial depth and rate of the lfo.

this is a sort of diagram for how it all works

here are some pictures of the inside of the finished pedal prior to some extensive debugging.

her is a crappy video i threw together. its too hard to try and play guitar, shoot a video and tweak a pedal at the same time so i just ran my omnichord through it. I'll try to make a better demo if i have time.

thanks for reading/watching.
-tanner

QUICK UPDATE

2011-01-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

this is a project that has been in the works for quite a long time. since discovering Paul Slocum's Synthcart some years ago, i have always imagined building a portable version. unfortunately though it has turned into a tedious curse. after numerous attempts and miserable failures for reasons yet to be discovered, i have finally returned to the project with confidence. the idea is pretty simple. first; use what i've learned from Ben Heckendorn's atari portable tutorial and hack up an atari2600. then add the Longhorn Engineer's video mod for a video out that actually works. then plug in the the Synthcart and it should all work perfectly right?

well, so far it hasn't worked. it did for a while though. actually it was working great untill suddenly it stopped working... i can only assume that the cart was bad because when i checked out the atari age store to buy yet another Synthcart, i found that they were selling newer versions called melody carts.

these new melody carts aparently employ newer chips that can be updated if need be. aparently the original carts were reused roms from 30 years ago. that must be why it died... god please! so far i havent tested my new cart in my hacked 2600. if it doesn't work, then that just means the problem is somewhere else and i have two working synthcarts instead of one. that would be cool but i'd rather it just work right off the bat. i'm so ready to be done with this project.

another thing is the screen i'm using. soon after i built, cut, sanded primed, painted, labeled, and coated my rad enclosure, the light in the lcd screen i chose decided to half burn out. haha!!! now i'm faced with the task of backlighting it with leds. unfortunately though it has to be perfect, so throwing a few leds back there wont do. i have ordered a few dozen right angle leds that are no bigger than half of a grain of rice. i am going to throw together an led driver circuit and make this thing shine. unfortunatley though, i just dont have the time. i am currently doing a lot of work for people right now too. i am also hoping to start a big job once i'm done with these pedal mods as well. we'll see. just need to keep pushing foward.

thanks for reading,

-tanner

"Light Miles" toy synth

2010-11-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

Well, its officially cold and wet again. its time to get back to Noystoise. over the past few months i have just been taking it easy and working on small scale projects. mostly just modding/fixing things for people for petty cash. i have also been helping my friend Matt build a couple hundred FuzzStang pedals. if you are into boutique fuzz, these are where its at. please don't ask me for the schematic though, i wont give it to you.

since its become un-fun outside, i have started a couple of projects, one of which is almost done. i figured i had better catch up on my blog before i have too many big projects to blog about.

This is a project among many that i have been meaning to post. i began this project in July and was finished by august. it started with a "Miles-388" keyboard, commonly known as the AK-900 or Hing Hon EK-001. i stripped the keyboard down to the chip and rebuilt it onto my Frankenstein proto-board. while exploring the circuits' capabilities, i seem to have caused some damage to the chip internally that caused some of the keys to go silent. it was tragic but worth it considering i was able to devise a way to trigger an envelope generator to modulate a VCF. this is a mod that i would have loved to have had on my recent Orange Hing Hon.

with the functionality of the keyboard hindered, i decided to build a "quick" lite version of what i would later build off of in the future. hence the name Light Miles.

Coming up with the envelope generator was actually pretty simple. in the AK-900 PDF, there are two envelope outputs that control analog filters for each of the two voices. from those i had to get a gate, then convert the gate to trigger to start my Attack/Release generator.

the trigger can also be synced with the tempo of the rhythm section(with indicator LED) or either of the two LFO's via the KEY SYNC function. of the two LFO's, one is labeled LFO and the other VIB. VIB is the the built in lfo that acts as the keyboards' vibrato by sending an inverted pulse to the pitch resistor effectively dropping the voltage going to the keyboard. it's kind of a funny approach considering the rate of the vibrato lfo is determined by the clock speed of the chip that it is modulating. there is a resistor in series with the vibrato I/O that determines how deep the pitch bend will be. i replaced that with a VIB depth pot. the vibrato signal can also be switched off to be used to trigger the piano keys being played and effectively synchronizes the VCF to the VIB. this is not an especially useful LFO if you consider that the frequency will only change with the pitch of the tones and the rhythms, but it does free up the other LFO for more modulation. the lfo labeled LFO is a square/triangle lfo. the triangle wave can only be switched on or off to modulate a small preset range of the VCF. it really just acts as a wahwah effect to layer on top of the VCF's other means of modulation. the square wave output of the LFO(with indicator LED) can also be switched to trigger the keys being played which will also effectively modulate the VCF through the envelope generator. in addition to that, the LFO can also be switched on to trigger each and all of the drum pads in the rhythm section. the LFO frequency is controlled by the RATE knob. in addition to the all of the lfo and vcf modulation, there is also a NOTE ON switch. when active, the NOTE knob can be jogged to hold any of the 12 notes between C and B of the octave below the low C on the keyboard. depending on what timbre the keyboard is set to, the note selected will either sound once and lock out it's voice until reswitched(piano), or hold indefinitely until reswitched(organ).

Originally upon finding that the integrated chip had become damaged, i had decided to utilize only the keys that were still working which reduced this keyboards' key range to 1-1/2 octave. because of this limitation i decided to use larger keys.upon further discovery i found that half of the drum sounds had been erased too. i was pretty disappointed but i did have a backup. years ago i had built a little black keyboard that i had named a "novelty synth" CX-500. the CX-500 is the same chip as the one in the miles/ak900/ek001 with minor differences in component placement. i was never satisfied with any aspect of the little black "novelty synth".

the paint was ugly, the keys were absolutely awful, and the only mods i really added along with rehousing it were two poorly adapted filters for the tone and rhythm sections. i didn't hesitate in ripping the little keyboard apart fore it's underutilized brain. since i had already set the keys and most of the hardware, there was not really any way to utilize the rest of the now functional keys. i had already planned to use the key hold mod so it made sense to have it trigger the keys that were not accessible through the keyboard.

On the top of the keyboard above the red section with all of the modulation hardware is the MIXER/PROG section. there are five red buttons for the program section and one five way switch directly below them in the modulation section. originally the keyboard has 8 rhythms, 8 timbres, and 4 drum sounds. originally each rhythm, timbre and drum sound had its own switch. i thought that this was a waste of time and space on my keyboard since they are only 9 I/O's mixed. in addition to the VIB on/off switch, there are four red buttons labeled 1,2,3,4. the five position switch selects which bank the buttons access; voice A(VA), voiceB(VB), rhythm A(RA), rhythm B(RB), and drum sounds(DRUM). to the left and above the VIB switch there is a 4-way directional switch for the rhythms: start,stop, tempo up, tempo down. to the right of that there are volume controls for clean keys(KEYS), master drums(DRUM), and master volume(MAIN). to the right of the MAIN volume is the power(ON) switch(with indicator LED). on the lefthand-top side of the keyboard there are the DX and KX joysticks and pots. i added frequency dividers to both the drum and keyboard sounds. their respective joystick mix the sub frequencies together and are then mixed back into the original signal through the DXvol or KXvol. the dividers are turned on and off through pushing down the center switch of the joystick. an led will indicate if either is on or off. the CLEAN DRUM pot is used to attenuate the original drum sounds from the master drum mix. i cant remember why i added this but it must have been important... there is a knob labeled CATCH KX. this is a simple lowpass filter for the signal from the keyboard sounds to the frequency divider. the higher the cutoff frequency goes, the crazier and dirtier the signal gets until it is just noise. its very useful as fuzz or a noise generator.

As if this all wasn't enough, i also added an echo circuit. its a pt2399 circuit that i adapted specially for this keyboard. it has the standard MIX, RATE, and FEED BACK that are commonly associated with the chip. the echo circuit really brings it all to another level.

among all of the things described, the keyboard has a built in speaker, 1/4" line out and runs off of 4 Ccell batteries. all of the hole cutting and case modding was done by yours truly. the paint is a kind of lego style color scheme done with acrylic airbrush paint. the lettering is all vinyl press-on lettering and the keyboard was finished with satin clear-coat for protection.

Wow! i cant believe i remembered all that. i guess i'm not as ignorant as i thought. please check out the photos for close-ups and watch the video if you haven't already.

Let me know what you think. thanks for reading.

-tanner

NEW POST!!!

2010-03-12T19:02:00.000-08:00

wow, its been a long time since i have posted anything here. i have mostly just been doing custom projects and odd jobs for people for the last couple of months. nothing worth posting. actually, now that i think about it i probably should have... oh well. this most recent project is definitely worth blogging about. this piece was a commission for a loyal enthusiast and valued customer of mine. i cant remember what the original criteria for the synth was exactly. im not even sure if i came close but hey, this is a sweet synth.
the synth is based around a very generic toy organ chip. i used the same chip in my "rainbow synth". the main voice is sent to an envelope follower for the attack release generator and also to a frequency divider where it is divided 8 times. each octave has a volume control on one of two axis of a joystick. the 8 octaves are then mixed back into the filter. the filter can also be modulated by one or two LFO's: LFO1, or LFO2 gated by LFO1. changing the GATE TIME pot on the AR generator will alter the AR generators response to the LFO as well, giving it even more diverse trigger sequences. the two LFO's also trigger the 8 step sequencer. you can choose LFO1 or LFO2 gated by LFO1. there is also a switch to allow the sequencer to be triggered by the main VCO just after the frequency divider. this makes for some INSANE timbres. this particular toy organ chip has got a few irritating setbacks. for one, in order to get 8 good sounding octaves from the divider, the chip has to be clocked pretty high, which is good because the action was pretty slow, but there was this sleep timer that went off literally 1 second after hitting a note. i built a simple lfo and sent it off to some redundant IO. it did the trick. another problem was the key hold. every keyboard with a sequencer should have a key hold switch to hold down the last key you pressed. usually you can just wire a switch to an unused key and it will switch to whatever key you press last. not this one though. it holds one key and one key only. i used a 12pos rotary switch for the key hold on this one. 9 of the 12 positions are connected to f#,g,g#,a,a#,b,c,c#,d. they can also be switched to a,a#,b,c,c#,d,d#,e,f of one octave lower. all issues fixed, this is sweet sounding little synth, especially with the added echo circuit. i had a few pt2399s laying around so i figured id throw one in. it is pretty excellent. i think i'll put a pt2399 in all of my projects from now on.
so from left to right the functions include; SEQUENCER switch with led indicator OFF>LFO1>LFO2viaLFO1, 8 step sequencer pots, VCF switch with led envelope indicator ECF>LFO1>LFO2viaLFO1, LFO1&2 pots, AR gate time pot, attack pot, EG depth pot, release pot, resonance pot, cutoff pot, power switch OFF>ON>ON/KEY HOLD OCT^, master volume, pitch bend, key press indicator led, main VCO trigger sequencer ON>OFF, echo feedback pot, echo rate pot, 4 joysticks for 8 sub octaves, rotary KEYHOLD switch, and finally a 1/4" line out.
this keyboard was all fitted into a travel size backgammon case that i found at goodwill. its actually pretty decent quality pleather. the panel was BOUGHT... yeah, first time ive ever had a piece of plastic cut to order. it was actually pretty easy. in fact it was a hell of a lot easier than cutting it by hand. only problem is it cost $50. ouch...
uuuhhh. ok, i feel like ive been typing forever even though ive only got like two paragraphs. forgive my A.D.D but its beer time. here are the pics and video. please comment.
INSIDE

OUTSIDE

SCHEMATIC

VIDEO

SUGAR FIRE

2009-10-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

i could play this circuit for the rest of my life and never get sick of it.
more to come.

UP/DOWN DIAL

2009-10-11T23:36:00.000-07:00

i cant remember when i finished this one exactly... it's pretty recent. basically i love my yamaha pss 480. i dont think i would ever consider circuit bending it just because i dont believe there's any point. the only thing i would change is having a jog wheel to adjust the parameters of the synth without having to press those up and down buttons. so thats what i did. i used an old mouse wheel as the encoder and after some time digging up and trying out different combinations of circuits, i came up with this:

basically when the well is turned up the parameter goes up and down when turned down.
i know what you're thinking, why didnt i just program a little pic or something to do that? well, i cant seem to find the time for micro controllers. eventually though i will finally be there. in the mean time, this circuit works pretty well. here are some pics. demo clip coming soon.

NEW TIME SYNTH

2009-10-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

i finished this one in august some time.. its a mini keyboard fitted into an old alarm clock i found. all i really remember about this is that i didnt like the first few schematics i came up with so i started over quite a few times. i also remember that i used an old dual audio amp for the filter and the AR generator. i think it was the 4565? yeah the 4565. it gave the AR generator some unexpected shapes but i liked it and kept it. i put a video up in September and it already has 5k hits! thanks to "matrixsynth","make", and others. thanks guys! but yeah, the keyboard is pretty awesome too. check out the schematic and the video demo for more info. heres some crappy pics i just took too.

OH YEAH, MY BLOG...

2009-10-11T22:58:00.000-07:00

wow, i have been putting this off for a long time so here we go.
shortly after finishing my "rainbow synth"(mid July) i started on a new keyboard. much like the rainbow synth, i added a frequency divider circuit to the main voice and a vcf with AR generator. the main objective of this project was to use the 4520 chips i've become so fond of to trigger drum sounds, and what better circuit than the notorious hing hon ek001. it all worked out great and i had this keyboard all built in under two weeks. it went surprisingly fast. that may be why i still dont completely understand the schematic. since i finished this project over two months ago, i dont exactly remember all of the details on constructing this keyboard, but i will say that it is truly my favorite. here is a demo video and some really bad pictures i just took. i'll post the schematic soon.

RAINBOW SYNTH

2009-07-11T00:46:00.000-07:00

i just finished this piece a couple of days ago.

the original circuit was from a rather generic toy keyboard from the nineties. all it consists of is a tone generator with i think 3 octaves including sharps. i think it also had some demo songs but i left them out. i took the signal coming from the keyboard, fed it through a comparator, ran it through a frequency divider, ran that through a filter and finally to a little headphone amp. the signal also triggers a one-shot that triggers an attack release generator that modulates the cut off frequency of the filter. sadly though, i built the one shot out of a 555 chip so it does click when the volume levels arent adjusted properly with an external amp. next time i'll use an op-amp or something. the one shot time can be adjusted with the "gate" pot. this kind of works as a sustain. the main vco can be mixed with two sub voices from the frequency divider. with voice one all the way up, it is the only one you can hear. all the way down and its between voice 2 and 3. there is also a 4 step sequencer that is tunable and can be triggered either by an LFO or the main VCO. both of which can be divided by 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 by another frequency divider. the VCO coming to the sequencer divider is actually 1/16 of the main VCO. the one shot can also be triggered with either the LFO or the VCO.

the case was made from an old touch and tell toy that i had in my collection. i added the keys the two big blue holes with all the functions and a big battery compartment. the lettering are dry press decals with lots of clear coat(notice the glaze?). the keys are color coded. this thing was supposed to be an homage to the resistor but the blue is a little too bright.

the lfo speed can be modulated manually too. there is also a resonance pot, envelope depth pot, a fine tuning pot for higher tuning, a coarse pitch bend, and a volume pot. all in all i am pretty happy with this keyboard despite all the grief it was giving me last week. i still have two more of these VCO chips and i think they will be put to similar use.

NOVELTY SYNTH REVISITED

2009-06-15T23:35:00.001-07:00

for the last 3 or 4 weeks i have been liquidating my shop. i have accumulated way too much over the last 3 years that ive lived here. it was a daunting task, but its finally done. its a nice feeling to know exactly what you have and where it is. since my shop had finally been taken care of, my first project would be one that ive been meaning to do for a long time. about a year ago i built a red "novelty synth". its the one with the drum machine and the programmable sequencer.
this keyboard had a few problems that i wanted to fix. i really love the drum circuit in this keyboard and i wanted to do it justice. the 7 step keys that activate each step in the sequence had to be held down continuously for the steps to be triggered. also, the keys themselves were hardly flexible so you had to push down really hard. this eventually caused them to break. i replaced the keys with another set of a similar style but smaller size. i used the remaining space on the keyboard for a small panel. i replace all the momentary tactile switches with latching push switches. push once and the step is on, push again and the step is off. this will make it much easier to adjust the parameters while the sequence is playing. this was all i was going to fix when i started this project, but when i opened it up, i noticed many more things that needed attention. the sequencer was being triggered by the audio output from the lm386 amplifier chip through a chain of signal diodes. the sensitivity switch just bypassed every other one. well its been a year and i can do better than that. i ran the direct output from the drum chip through a comparator and to the sequencer. this makes for much more stable triggering. the output was ridiculous. it was basically a 5k from the lm386 to the speaker and a 5k from the tone generator to the speaker. it was too hot. instead i mixed the signals into the input of the lm386. the drum goes through a 50k to the input of the chip and the tone generator goes through a 50k to the drum 50k. i added a filter to the tone generator with cutoff. i also ran the tone generator through a frequency divider and added a 50k pot to mix between i think 1 an 1/8. it could be mixed better but i think its fine. i also built an attack release generator to modulate the filter. i didnt have enough room for a release pot so i left it closed and just used the attack function. it wasnt until i was finished with this project that i realized i probably could have both on one pot... the A generator is triggered the same way the sequencer is except the trigger goes through the other half of the frequency divider. there is a 3 position switch that will select 1, 1/2, and 1/4 steps. here is the schematic:

here are some before and after shots:
BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

CLICK THESE PHOTOS FOR DETAIL
new video

LO-FI WORKSTATION

2009-05-13T23:45:00.000-07:00

this was supposed to be a quick project but i got really sick for a week. after thinking of scrapping the whole project, i soon began to get better and decided to finish it. i am very pleased with the finished product. that is all.

INSIDE THE GLITCH KEYBOARD

2009-04-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

yeah, i should really think up a better name for this design.any ideas?
first step: gather toys and parts
glitch circuit. this is not the actual toy that i used but it is similar. the glitch comes from shorting the clock speed resistor. the reset is a normally on tactile switch that disconnects the power to the circuit when pressed. the pitchbend is a 10k pot with the outer lugs connected to ground via 10k resistor and to vcc via 27k resistor.

the circuit is too large to fit into the keyboard so i consolidate the circuit and cut it down to a more reasonable size.

the drum circuit is pretty generic. i found two boxes of 12 at an outlet store and bought them all.

this circuit can be found in many different drum toys, but these are much smaller in size making them easier to work with. the pitch bend is the other 10k pot on the joysick with a 15k to ground and a 22k to vcc. the npn transistor on the left used to drive an led. i used this point to trigger the keyboard.

the keyboard is a super cheap toy! the plastic is very thin and sensitive to heat. when hotgluing everything together, i have to keep the plastic cool by blowing it with my airbrush until the glue is cooled. on the other hand, this plastic is extremely easy to cut with an exacto knife. this makes cutting the faceplate section out a breeze.

the circuit in the keyboard is unimpressive. there are no components whatsoever. the circuit loses power when you hit the keys and it sort of detunes the note maybe to get more of a piano envelope or something. there is a demo mode, but i left thos out of the interface. the 8 notes activate by connecting them to vcc. i cut the connection from the vcc to the keys and rerouted them to the drum circuit's LED output. this way the keys will only be triggered if the drums are played. also, the keyboard output is fed to the base of the drum circuit's output transistor. this gets rid of that bad "piano" envelope and the keyboard audio is modulated by the drum sounds making it sound all "8-bit".

in order to use the drum and glitch circuit, i utilize the the unused black keys. for this i have to add a small circuit board.

the 4 switches to the left will activate the drum sounds and, and the one to the right will sound the glitch circuit(carhorn). the 3 drum switches to the left play drum sounds and 3 different rhythms when the rhythm is playing. there is also a 4 position slide switch that will hold the rhythm continuously. the 4th switch to the left is the rhythm start/stop switch.

the joystick is just a run of the mill game controller joystick. i found some little plastic beads and drilled tiny holes into them to replace the big hemispherical caps that were originally on them. i also took the joysticks apart and removed the spring the holds the stick in the middle. this way the stick will stay where ever you leave it.

putting it all together is pretty easy as long as everything is working properly(and you used a 15k not a 51k resistor). after about the 5th time building one of these, it comes together pretty fast. i finished the last of 3 today. from start to finish it took about 2 hours.

since there is not a lot of room in these, i like to keep the wires as short as possible. here are some peeks into the inside of a finished one.

and the finished product

each one of these is slightly different. the one with the blue joystick's audio is mixed differently that the other two, and the one on the bottom has the line out in front of the keyboard(thats because i'm an idiot). to hear these 3 in action, watch this video.

ANOTHER GLITCH KEYBOARD

2009-04-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

while i was waiting for the paint to dry on my casio pt-100, i threw this together. its basically a new version of the holiday keyboard with the addition of a glitch circuit. watch the video...

DUMB MACHINE

2009-04-10T23:12:00.000-07:00

i finished this one a couple weeks ago. i spent three weeks building it but i was too lazy to even go up stairs to get my camera, so this entry is pretty brief. i found a toy drum at the bins a while back(pre-toy crisis).

i've had a couple of these in the past, but this one was slightly different than the other two. actually the other two are a funny story. back in the earlier days of my bending career, i found one of these for a couple bucks at a thrift store and had big plans for incorporating it with a "yak-back" and some other stuff. i had it all planned out and ready to go, but then i fried it, or so i thought. in order to salvage the project, i shelled out $35 for a new one off ebay. unfortunately the new one wasnt the same. the record function only played back your rhythms as they were recorded. the old one snapped each hit to the step. also, by the time it had shipped to me, i had already lost interest in the project...ok, that wasnt a funny story at all... anyway, i found this one and quickly noticed that the 8 demo rhythms were not as realistic as the first two i had owned. they were pretty much just random sounds and orch. hits. the drum sounds themselves were pretty good though and the retriggerability is great too. i stripped the circuit down to the chip and decided to rehouse it into an old modem box i found.
THE MODS:

each drum sound is triggerable via one of six LFOs. because the drum sounds were triggered with pressure sensitive peizos, the LFO frequency can go pretty high without causing any stuttering in the drum sounds with the exception of the kick drum which was triggered with a regular foot switch. for each of the 6 LFO's, there is a 3 position switch. each switch selects either manual(normal)trigger/LFO continuous trigger/LFO manual trigger. below each 3 position switch is a momentary push switch. with the LFO in manual(normal), the sounds will only trigger once per tap. in LFO manual, the momentary switch will enable the LFO only when the button is pushed. in LFO continuous, the button does nothing. to the right of the 6 drum sound buttons are 4 function switches. the two on the left control the tempo and the other two are for record and stop. to the left of the 6 slide pots that control the LFO's frequencies, there is a longer slide pot that is the pitch bend. at the top of the machine is the pitch mod and echo section. from right to left there are a joystick that controls the speed of the pitch bend LFO and the speed of the echo, a three position switch that changes the pitch bend LFO shape from tri to saw to rev. saw, a switch that turns the pitch bend LFO on and off, a switch that turns the echo on and off, and a pot for the number of echos. when the echo times pot is all the way up it feeds back just a little bit and can get out of control if you want it to. in the back there is a power on/off switch, a 1/4" line out, and an RCA mic in jack for the echo. i also left some room back there in case i want to add ports for external devices such as drum pads or a keypad to activate those cheesy demos, and possibly a volume pot for the mic input. the 4 leds in the front indicate from left to right, power on, echo on, pitch lfo on, and the last one blinks with the sounds and also lights up solid when recording. ok, i think thats about it. i kind of wished i had taken pictures of the inside but oh well.

CASIO PT-100

2009-03-18T15:06:00.000-07:00

i found this keyboard at the bins. it cost about $4 and was covered in filth. despite how dirty it was, the keyboard was in perfect cosmetic condition. i had one of these a long time ago, but i harvested it for parts because it was in such bad condition. from what i had remembered, the pt-100 is pretty limited. there are not a lot of functions on this keyboard. it pretty much just has 8 rhythms, 8 voices, and a very limited accompaniment section. after looking it up on tablehooters , i quickly got work trying out some of his mods. i thought it would be kind of cool to select the rhythms and voices through the keyboard and replace the slide switches with cutoff pots for two separate VCF's. i also replaced the volume switch with a volume pot.

the two VCF pots had to be modified. the 100k slide pots i have are really slow to slide. this is because there is this thick grease in there that slowed them down and makes them smoother. i wanted these pots to be quick so i opened them up and wiped out all of the grease. the fast action makes for better filter modulation in my opinion. originally i had planned on adding an AR generator to modulate the filter, but i soon found that this keyboard is very stingy with its mA's. this was a real problem when it came to finding a good source on the board for the VCF's and the DCO for the pitch bend. eventually i had to resort to replacing the weird power switch with a normal power on/off switch. the pt-100 has a dpdt switch for the power, but it could be replaced with momentary on and off switches because power is still going to the board even when its off. i thought this was kind of pointless so i wired the on switches together and turned the slide switch in to a power on/off switch. this way the VCF and DCO are sure to not drain the batteries while the power is off. i had the DCO running from a 5v point at the amplifier section, but it was starving the CPU for some reason so i threw in a 7805 and a decoupling capacitor at the 7.5v source, and it fixed the problem. the pitch bend is just under two octaves.
anyone who has ever circuit bent a casio pt-100 knows that there are some great distortions to be found when shorting the R/C mixer section. for my mods i added 3 thumb wheel pots. the top one distorts and de-syncronizes the PCM of whatever voice you are on. with the combination of the variable amount of the bend, the pitch bend, 6 voice polyphony, the VCF, and 12 voices, this keyboard can make some pretty interesting waveforms. the sound kind of remind me of some of the better bends found on a CASIO SK-1. the middle thumb wheel pot controls the gain of the chord section. this one can get pretty nuts too. when turned all the way up, it makes a wall of distortion that can then be filtered by the VCF. the third thumb wheel controls the gain of the bass chord. this makes the bass chord sound much richer and analog with the VCF. the bass is mixed with half of the drum section, so it shares the same filter and distortion mods as the bass. the chord and bass also share the same VCF, but there is a 3 position switch to change between bass/bass&chord/chord. the other half of the drum section which consists of the bass drum and toms bypasses any filtering and goes straight to the amp unless you turn it off via the little black switch in the middle of the keyboard. when the bass drums are off, the rest of the accompaniment gets a little bit louder even when the drums aren't playing. this kind of doubles as a volume limiter for the accompaniment section say if you want the lead to be a bit louder than the chord. the other 3 position switches are for selecting rhythms and voices on the keyboard. in the center position the keys will act like normal keyboard keys, but in the up or down positions, you can select 12 rhythms and 12 voices. this is an upgrade from the previous 8 rhythms and 8 voices that were selectable through the slide switches. thanks again to tablehooters for the idea.
alright, what am i forgetting? the pt-100 also includes a chord on/off switch, a rhythm stat/stop switch, tempo up/down switches, a demo button, and an added 1/4" line out. during this project i developed a greater sense of respect for people who circuit bend vintage casios and yamahas. i almost forgot how frustrating it is to not know what the hell anything is without a service manual. it will probably be a long time before i circuit bend a vintage keyboard again. this one took over two weeks to debug. i've had to reopen and re close this thing more time than i can recall. during all the debugging, the paint job acquired a few scratches and scuffs too. oh well, i guess thats just part of it.

i am planning on selling this keyboard on eventually. if you are interested, just look up circuit bent on ebay in the coming week.

RHYTHM MACHINE FINISHED...

2009-02-24T23:51:00.000-08:00

well its been a long week. after spending about 14 hours putting all the circuitry together on friday, i took a 3 day break for my day job. it was quite the wait. i thought that if the circuits all went to plan, i would have a new keyboard by friday night, but naturally some things didnt work. in a nutshell, the filter/amplifier module was wrong(i still dont understand why), i drew up the keyboard's schematic wrong in some places(three times), and some of the lfo mods that i didnt breadboard first didnt work at all. i put in a few hours before and after work over the weekend, but it wasn't until today that i wrapped this project up. i rebuilt the amplifier/vcf module and fixed the errors i had made with the schematic. i put it all on bread board before i built the module again. it was exactly the same as the first one. i still dont understand why the first one didnt work. the second lfo that was supposed to modulate the pitch bend didnt go deep enough and raised the minimum pitch too much to have a coarse and fine pitch bend. instead i sent the square output to the vcf so now you can modulate it with either ramp or/and square. i also got rid of the feedback function and used the pot to cap the depth of the square vcf mod. there was some bad buzzing coming from this keyboard. i knew it was there the whole time. thats just the price you pay when combining toys and single supply vcf's, but when i put it back together it was much louder. i went back in and found that the filter/amp section needed to be further away from the keypad. i had to UNGLUE it! i hate ungluing! i pulled it away and wrapped it in electrical tape(not sure if that does anything) and now the sound is as faint if not more so than when i prototyped the circuit. there are still some things i have to fix though. the lfo pots that trigger the cowbell and bass drum also control the vcf modulation. the switches that turn the triggers on and off are supposed to be right next to their respective knobs, but for some reason the switch for the bass drum is next to the cowbell pot and viceversa. also the square signal that is modulating the vcf is a little too strong. you can hear an annoying click when you turn the speed up. i also need to fix the 1/4" line out. it sounded kind of squirly when i hooked it up to my computer. i'm sure its an easy fix. here are some pictures of the assembly.

the video is pretty uninformative because my camera ran out of batteries and space. i hope its audible.

RHYTHM MACHINE

2009-02-18T23:24:00.000-08:00

i started this project a week ago today. i was thinking of doing up another mini glitch keyboard but i wanted some better rhythms. i found this old barbie keyboard laying around that had some pretty nice semi analog drum beats. i broke it all down and found that the keyboard could in fact run off of 3 volts, but in the process of deconstructing the circuit i found a bunch of hidden voices, rhythms, and functions that were too cool to leave out of the project. in order to fully utilize all of these functions, i would need a lot of switches and pots, and there wasnt enough surface area on the mini keyboard. instead i used this little baby organ toy that i had laying around. it to only held two AA batteries, but the battery door was big enough to fit 3 AAA's after a little modding. the thing that i really found interesting about this circuit is that not only are there two outputs from the chip for keyboard tones and rhythms, but there is a third output that is soldered directly to the rhythm output. after disconnecting them, i found that the snare and hat sounds are on a separate channel that the bass drum and cowbell. i really could have gone very minimal with this project and just made it in to a drum cube or something, but i decided to go all out this time. basically i designed my own functional interface with all the new easteregggs i found, added a volume mixer pot between the two drum signals, added two pots to slightly change the rhythm output envelopes, pitch bends(fine and coarse), replace the transistor r/c amplifier circuit with a 386 with adjustable gain and feedback, added a vcf to the keyboard tones, added 4 separate lfo's to trigger each drum sound with adjustable frequency and on/off switches, and made it possible to switch the cowbell and bass drum lfo to modulate the vcf and pitch bend respectively, with or without triggering those drum sounds. the function switches are set up like this; since there was not enough room(or time in the world) to cut and put in 27 momentary switches, i just put in 11. one is to turn the power on and off, two others are for increasing or decreasing the tempo only, the other 8 are hooked up to a three position switch that is also hook up to a tri-colored LED. in one position the buttons will select rhythms, in the second voices, and in the third functions like rec/playback, rhythm start/stop, etc. in each of the three positions the LED will glow in a different color, red green or blue. what else... oh yeah, since i decided to only use one octaves worth of keys, there is a transpose switch that moves the keyboard up one octave. so far thats it. now i just have to decide on colors. more to come. here are some pics so far.

deconstruction notes

revised notes and schematics

breadboard(it works!)

that blob in the middle is all i need

side profile

parts

tape up

NEW GLITCH KEYBOARD

2009-02-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

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.

glitch keyboard

2009-01-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

i started this one last week and finished today. basically its a holiday synth with an added glitch circuit. the keyboard i used is slightly larger than the holiday synth, its about 8" in length. i hadnt planned on taking so long for this one but i was lazy this weekend. its got a bunch of crazy switches. one of whitch i dont understand? when i was drawing up the schematic for this i was thinking of writing out descriptions of what each switch does and how it should sound, but i didnt and i forgot. so now there is a switch that does things that are... unknown? i'll probably go back in and do something with it. or at least figure out why it doesnt sound fucking rad!

FINAL PROJECT OF 2008

2008-12-31T18:36:00.000-08:00

i threw this one together today. i've been in the basement since 11am. thats pretty good time if you ask me. basically its one of those cheap digital cameras that you find at walgreens for $10. i found this one at goodwill yesterday. i havent been able to connect any wires to the chips on these things because i dont have the right equipment yet. although these are extremely bendable, for this one i just removed the ir filter and added a better lens. oh yeah, i also rehoused it into a badass little kids toy camera. i added the lens(big pain in the ass), switches, usb io, viewfinder, and a battery compartment.

HOLIDAY SYNTH VIDEO

2008-12-29T13:48:00.000-08:00

HOLIDAY KEYBOARDS

2008-12-27T22:44:00.000-08:00

i have been working on these in secret for the last month. they are pretty basic. they consist of a generic drum machine circuit and an 8-note keyboard. some have joysticks, some have just a pitch bend for the drums. the 8-note keyboard will not make sound unless the drum circuit is making sound. the notes are cross modulated with the drum sounds making for some interesting tone variations. each has a 1/8" output jack and power indicator LED. these are capable of many different functions despite the limited interface. the black keys act as the drum circuit's function switches.
these keyboards were intended for gifts to my family and friends for the holidays, although there will probably be more to come in the future.
chick on this picture for bigger view.

TWO DAY PROJECT

2008-11-12T17:42:00.000-08:00

this is a little something i've been working on for the last week.

the rain in portland is out of control. i decided not to even bother with a paint job. instead i just used a kind of matching lego color scheme. in all, this only took about two and a half days to make. i probably could have finished it in one, but i didnt realize that until half way through the first day. the second day i was distracted by stuff thats not interesting. i finished it today in about 3 or 4 hours.

the circuit came from a toy keyboard/guitar convertible. you know, the one that looks like a guitar and then folds out in to a piano.

it had a few other functions on it but they sounded crappy to me. the toy its housed in is this little baby piano music box thing. i dont have a lot of pictures. this thing went pretty fast. but who cares what it used to look like anyway?
here is a functional diagram

here is the video that i thought was good until i uploaded it

CRAPPY VIDEO

2008-10-30T00:35:00.001-07:00

2008-10-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

OK, NOW IT'S DONE.

well, its been a long time since i've posted anything on here, but i have been busy. actually this might have been the longest project so far. hmm, where to start... soon after i finished my last project in early september, i started looking around my collection of toys and keyboards trying to come up with a new direction. after about a week of dabbling with different toy circuits, i found a keyboard in a junk box full of toys i had planned on getting rid of.

its a pretty common keyboard. it has 8 different drum beats, some really terrible timbres, 4-5 voice polyphony. the thing that really got me interested in this keyboard is that the lm386 amplifier had an additional circuit built on to it to flash two channels of leds to the sound of the keyboard. thinking at the time that this would be a quick project to throw together, the fact that that circuit was already built was a selling point. once i found the circuit i wanted to use, it was just a matter of finding something to put it in. i found this old "creatoy" keyboard that i had picked up at a thrift store a long time ago.

this isnt the the one i used. i forgot to take a picture of it before i tore it all up. its pretty much the same except the one i used had like a little piano or something on it. after searching for keys to put into it for like two hours, i found a two octave keyboard that fit alost perfectly. after some sanding, they fit like a glove. i then cut out the faceplate from a spare piece of plastic.

then i had to figure out how to consolidate the circuits to fit into the new enclosure. after carefully deconstructing and documenting the circuit, i put it all back together in its new form.

for the function switches i used a keypad from a portable clock i found at goodwill. i carefully buffed the silkscreen off of the rubber pads with a sander bit on my dremel. unfortunately the keypad that originally went with the keyboard keys was rotten and unusable, so i used large push switches from an old typing keyboard. i was considering mini tactile switches, but you dont get to push the keys very far with those. i wanted something at least a little bit more natural. that is why i used bigger keys for this in the first place. the battery compartment gave me a lot of grief. the original compartment was a space hog and only produced 4.5 volts. i cut a hole that was big enough to fit a 4 pack of aaa's, but they had nothing to rest against. i decided to cut out a bigger hole and just throw in a 6 aa battery holder with a battery door and everything. at this point i didnt know what additional circuitry would be going in the keyboard and how much voltage i would need. if i need 9v, no problem. if i only need 6, no problem.

at this point it was getting pretty late in to september. heidi and i went to LA for a week and came back in october. when i got back i had to familiarize myself with what i had done so far on this project. i decided to use the led circuit to modulate the pitch of the keyboard with one channel, and the cutoff of a filter to give it a cool auto wah sound. i knew that adding a vcf to a shitty toy was going to be a big pain in the ass, but i was up for it.

i soon found that i couldnt simply insert the filter in between the chip and the amplifier. there wasnt enough signal? i decided to add the filter after the first 386 amplifier and the add another one after the filter. im sure there was a more sophisticated approach to this but i think i tried everything. i breadboarded it up and cleaned up the ins and outs to get as clean a signal as possible. i worked great. i was having a lot of fun playing with it on the breadboard. once i put it all together on a circuit board things changed. i kept getting this retarded buzzing sound from the chip. after days and days of trying to eliminate it, i realized that the filter was just not going to cooperate with this chip. i tried switching the 386 amps for each other, rebuilding the filter with a different chip, and hundreds of combinations of passive filters between the ins and outs of everything. in the end i found that adding a gain capacitor to the final filter helped a bit but you can still kind of hear it. i decided to get rid of the pointless volume pot and replace it with a gain pot. when its closed the filter makes the 386 oscillate. kind of a pseudo resonance knob.

oh yeah, i also decided to add lfo's. go figure. the switches that turn on the env. modulation have a third position that turns on an oscillator that modulates the respective effect(pitch and/or filter). the oscillator speed is modulated by the envelope coming from the keyboard. this doesnt make sense does it? you'll see in the video. there are also switches that change lfo shape between triangle and square. the max frequency of the two oscillators is controlled by a joystick. the two psp joysticks control the minimum and maximum depths of the pitch bend and cutoff. there is also a pot right below the pseudo-res. knob. it is the fine pitch tuning knob. there is a switch to the right of the lfo joystick. this switches the lower octave to the octave above the high octave. the switch above that is a reset disable switch. this particular keyboard resets itself after 12-13 measures. super annoying. i used the audio signal to throw a transistor that switches the one key function(makes no sound). this function only worked with the rec.-play and the demo functions. i hadnt planned on keeping any of those, but i soon realized that if you use the one key function on demo mode, you can get these sweet loops to mess with. this wont work if the transistor is connected, so i added a disable switch. the blue square button to the right is the demo switch.
ok, what else? oh ya, there was a mic with this keyboard at one time so i added a line in. it also modulates the vcf and pitch bend and stuff. i've been having some fun with my guitar through it. it also has a line out that disables the speaker.

as far as the paint job is concerned; WHATEVER! it started out perfect and then i dropped it on the floor. now its scuffed. also, i put this kind of like Styrofoam protector around the lfo joystick to protect it while i was working on the inside and i hot glued something inside that heated up the other side of the faceplate that was touching the foam. it melted and bonded with the paint. oh well. live and learn.

well, thats about it. or at least thats all i can remember sorry if this is all jumbled together like crap. its hard to fit 2 months in. let me know what you think. i will post a video soon. by the way, dont be afraid to click the pictures to see it in high res.

TOY AXE FINALLY FINISHED!

2008-09-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

ok, so i probably should have put up a few more posts during the development of this project. i did take a bunch of pictures along the way so i guess i'll just have to narrate them as they upload.........

this is the keyboard. its about the size of a stick of gum. this and the amplifier board are all i am using of the the entire keyboard. the rest will probably get used for a future project.

here are some pictures of the paint job. i used red because every where i go all the stores are out of orange fusion. this red was pretty old and took a long time to dry. it also picked up a few scuffs when i was putting the hardware in(nothing too noticeable).

fitting the hardware was pretty challenging. the keyboards went in pretty easy but the knobs had to be carefully sanded and trimmed to fit without rubbing the surface. i dont like knobs that scrape.

here is a picture of all the hardware in place. the keypad is still loose.

here is the underside.

this is the oscillator that caused me a lot of grief(notice the direction of the 4148 to the npn)

after meticulously planning and documenting my work(taking my time), i got to a point where i felt that i could finish this project in about an hour. on monday i figured i'd use my day off to finish this piece and get on with my life. well i was right, it only took an hour to wire it all up and put it all back together, but when i turned it on the damn thing started glitching out like crazy. it sounded kind of like the output from the chip might be shorting to one of the function pins. this really really made me mad because i had already pretty much covered everything inside the keyboard with hot glue in such a way that it would never come off again. the worst part was that i didnt know which board to unglue and fix. after a couple of hours ripping up glue, i found out the short was in the keypad which just happened to have the most glue. i fixed the problem and reglued the whole thing confident that i had fixed the problem and that i wouldnt ever need to get back in there. but, the problem persisted and i had to rip it all out again. the problem was that i had to solder to the tiny tracings on the circuitboard because there were no pads to solder to. this made for some tricky soldering. after finding the short again, i made sure that the wires were on there tight and i kept the keyboard running while i glued it back in. by the time i had finished all this, 5 hours had gone by and i was pretty stressed out. in fact i was so stressed out that it didnt seem to bother me so much that the neck of the guitar had been resting on the tip of my soldering iron and melted a big ass hole in it. i just let out a quite "oh fuck" and put it back together. once it was back together i noticed that the paint job wasnt planning on sticking for too long. i imagine that this keyboard will be noticeably scratched all in due time. damn. but at least it was working. i took it up stairs and started playing with it but noticed that every time i turned the lfo on and off it would reset the keyboard and i would lose all my saved stuff. also the second lfo didnt work at all. damn damn. i decided to just let it go and fix it all later.

TODAY!
i went back in to the guitar and found the problem with the oscillators. i had to rebuild the circuit on a breadboard but that didnt take long. i fixed the reset problem. it was the lfo on/off switch, it was grounded. easy easy. once i put it all back together, i put a sander bit on my dremmel and cleaned up that melted spot on the neck. fortunately it can pass as a thumb pad.
now it all works how it should and im happy. i didnt get to try the level meters but oh well.

here is a truth table for the keypad

thats it. (not for sale)

TOY AXE!!!

2008-08-21T00:13:00.000-07:00

NEW PROJECT

last Thursday i started this project. the idea came to me as soon as i found this toy guitar at the bins. i wanted to have a guitar with a keyboard on the fretboard. everything else kind of came together on its own.

after opening it up, i noticed that the circuit was capable of having sharps and flats. it was just a matter of wiring them in. my first idea was to have an A.R. generator triggered by the keys that modulates a vcf. it took a long time to make this all work. the one major problem was that there was no capacitor to switch in order stretch the note long enough to catch the end of the a.r. generator. all i could find was a short that held the note until the auto reset kicked in. and since the vcf sounds best when the keyboard is under clocked, the note would hold for like 2 minutes. after a bout two days of bread boarding, i decided that this circuit was a lost cause. it sounded really cheap anyway and it had a bad case of monophony. after searching my toy collection for a new direction, i found this:

despite its size, this keyboard is actually extremely compact.

this is the amplifier

the keyboard is 4 voice polyphonic, 10 rhythms, 10 timbres, auto accompaniment with 5 timbres on each bass and chord, record and playback, drum record and playback, 6 drum sounds, stereo amplifier, on and on and on.... and it sounds really really good for a cheap toy keyboard. its clocked at 3.58MHz. needless to say, there are too many function switches to fit on the guitar that i have, so i got an idea for a switch program pad:

coincidentally i found this at the bins the same day i found the guitar

i got 45 switches down to 15. the only problem is that you will have to have a sort of truth table in front of you to make it work. 5 of the switches will have led indicators for different functions. if i have enough juice left after everything else, i think i'll try to put stereo level meters behind the other 10.
ok, so now that i have a sort of plan and i have completely deconstruct and documented the keyboard, i can finally move on to my favorite part cutting up the plastic and fitting it all together.

template for hole

guide lines

hole

littler keys

fits good

mazel tov

dirty hole

clean hole

switch pad holder

switch pad

with buttons

guides

keys

hole

done for today

i dont think this will all fit on one page so i'm going to cut myself off here.

$$$$$$$$

2008-08-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

well, i finished debugging my recent circuit bent keyboard. now its up on ebay. if you're interested, please take a look NOYSTOISEebay

TO BE CONTINUED...

2008-08-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

well, i was hoping that i'd be more excited about finishing this keyboard today, but in my haste to finish it, i didnt actually breadboard the entire circuit before i built it. needless to say there were a lot of problems i didnt see coming. it should have only taken about two hours to finish, but it took six hours to come to a good enough stopping point. there are still a lot of things i would like to change. i really just dont care enough though. i'll probably go back and fix all the things i dont like and throw in some led's too, but only because i'm planning on selling this on ebay. haha! all in all this is a decent circuit bent keyboard(relatively). here a re some pics and a super crappy video.

JULY 31?

2008-07-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

shit, i thought it was the 1st of august all day today. i even called my sister to tell her happy birthday. why didn't she tell me?...
anyway, i've been working on this keyboard for the last two weeks. the only reason it's taken me this long is because i'm really not in to it. i'm kind of just slapping a whole bunch of shit together. we'll see what it sounds like when i'm done. i also dont really care about the color scheme. instead of going to the store to buy the colors i wanted, i just used some colors that were laying around. the only thing i'm really excited about is are the huge buttons, switches and knobs i used. i usually use really small stuff but this time i went big. i probably could have finished this keyboard today, but i just didnt feel like it. it should be done by tomorrow. here's some pictures.

FINISHED

2008-06-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

today i finished the "time synth". it only took 6 hours. here's some pics i took along the way.

AND THE VIDEO

TIME MACHINE

2008-06-25T13:24:00.001-07:00

last week i started this toy synth built out of an old alarm clock. i thought it would be a quick project taking maybe a week at most, but so far it has given me a lot of trouble. it will basically consist of a one octave keyboard with a 5 step arpegiator, two filter mods, and a pitch bend. it will also have the option of switching the arpegiator to one of the filter sweep functions, and it will have a key hold switch that will hold the last key you pressed.
pictures:

thats all for now.

2008-06-10T13:08:00.001-07:00

FINISHED

2008-06-09T17:41:00.000-07:00

DAY13: put on a coat of white on the sides that will show through the grills.

DAY14: didn't do anything.

DAY15: wired it up, put the keys in, built the lfo circuit, glued it all tight, and finished at about 5pm. i would have taken more pictures of the inside, but i wanted to hurry up and finish this thing. and actually it didn't even really look that impressive in there anyway. i still had tons of room left inside. pretty tidy i must say. there are a couple flaws i noticed right away. i used the bigger half of the joystick for the depth of the lfo(about 90k) thinking that it would help the pitch bend go lower. unfortunately when the depth is at its lowest, it doesn't excite the transistor so the modulation stops. also, the orange paint is a little cracked in some places. the cracks are extremely small. i think that the acrylic dried before the enamel cured and it caused it to do this. i hope so at least. only time will tell if it is a bigger problem. also, when both "square" and "ramp" are modulating at the same time the peak tops out pretty high. oh well, this is hardly a real synthesizer. here's the pics

i will be posting a functional diagram and a video soon.

DAY 12

2008-06-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

day 12: time to paint!
this has got to be the most intense part of any of my projects. i can only hope that i dont fuck up too bad. i usually fuck something up in each of my paint jobs. as you probably know if you live in portland, the weather sucks right now. its cold and the rain is teasing me. since i started this project, i knew i wanted to paint it a solid light color to compliment its industrial style features. at first i thought i should paint the whole thing solid white, but that was too ipod's. i then thought it might be a good idea to paint it orange with a blue-white fade behind the grills, but then i thought that might look too artsy. i also thought about orange on white, yellow on black, so on and so on. i think i'll go with a simple solid orange. i figured i could use krylon fusion but they didnt have that color at the hardware store. "fusion" is the only dependable spray paint i know of, even though it beads. i've had great results from generic spray paints, but its a gamble from can to can. i really prefer the airbrush over everything, but the acrylic paint wont stick to plastic that hasnt been sanded and primed(i dont care what you say).

after testing techniques. i've decided to put on a base coat of fusion white and airbrush orange on to it before it cures.

airbrush paint can be a pain in the ass(even badger) you always have to modify the viscosity. i ve found that the testors stuff you buy at walmart is the easiest to use right out of the jar. ultra thin and bright candy coat, dries fast and even. its too bad you cant get it in more than a half oz at a time.

here is the box partially assembled with the orange paint.

it turned out a little more florescent than i had expected. i think the acrylic paint reacted with the fusion somehow. i think i might go back and paint in white behind the grills after all. it kind of looks like it might bring it together better. i'll have to wait until the paint is fully dried though. i will have to use tape to mask the orange parts and i dont want to risk pulling up the paint with it.

2008-06-05T15:21:00.000-07:00

day 5:
Saturday morning i rewired the keyboard to see if it still worked. it didnt. thats because i forgot i scraped the vcc+ trace to the keys to try triggering the keys with an oscillator. (that didnt work at high frequencies when the keyboard's clock was low so i 86'd it)any way i found the problem and it worked. then i glued the keyboard "tops" to the box and sanded the edges. this all took two hours before i had to go to work.

day 6: BRING ON THE CRITICAL ERRORS!
error #1: thought it was a good idea to put some hours in late at night after work.
error #2: thought i should bend one of the keys over to the side to make them more aligned.
error #3: try to bend the key using a blow torch
with the keys out of the box they seemed rather misaligned. what i didnt realize at the time was that the hole cut for the keys was flush to the perimeter of the set. in order to bend the plastic i melted it first with a little butane torch and bent it into place. it didnt work how i planned. i realigned the one key on the end but a different one moved. after i fixed them a few times to make them parallel, i soon realized that now the hole was too big. i then had to return the keys to their original state. hopefully the melting of the plastic hasnt compromised the integrity of the keys. after that i realized that ther was significant warping on the piece of plastic that holds all the keys together. that s when i said hell with it and decided to swap out the keys with my backup keys. unfortunately the backup keys were a different size. oops! to make a long story longer; i ended up sanding the warped parts down and got myself back to where i was 3 hours earlier. i then went to bed.
day 7: nothing
day8: didnt even go into the basement
day 9: worked 11 hour shift on a position ive never been trained on with no help and no breaks whatsoever. still waiting for some empathy.
day 10: did a little touching up on the box and drafted some templates for where all the hardware will go on the side panels.
DAY 11: used my templates i made to cut extremely precise holes in the side panels for the hardware. this is the joystick side.

this is the switch and pot side.

and here's the speaker side

here are some shots of the whats left of the box

and here is all of it before being put together

(oops, almost forgot to add a line out)
now im just waiting for the weather to clear up so i can go out side and start painting it. what the hell is going on with all this cold rain!?

funbox day 4

2008-05-30T22:21:00.001-07:00

today was day 4 of production on the "funbox". to start, i cut a third and final side panel for the joystick side of the box. i also removed the springs from within the joystick so that it will stay in position when not in use. otherwise the stick would spring back to the center when not in use. this side panel is the most precisely flush one yet, and it only took about 10 minutes to make(the first one took about an hour).

after assembling the circuit on my proto-board one last time to make sure it all works with the components ive chosen to use, i took it all apart and cut the circuit board in to three pieces. two of which will be used under the sets of keys.

after that i had to rewire the circuit board back together. this was a frustrating task to say the least. i had to sand off the top layer of protective coating from the tracings without damging them, tin them up with solder, and and solder the joints together(less than 1mm wide).

i then hot glued the wires to the circuit board to ensure that they would not come loose from rough handling. sure enough, they did anyway and i had to go back and fix and re-glue them. after that i had to make some modifications to the inside of the box to ensure that the two keyboards would line up with their respective keys. this process is is probably one of the most time consuming factors of all of my projects. i found myself staring at my project for 2 hours, imagining the potential setbacks that could arise. although it seems like a wast of time, it actually saves me a lot of frustration in the end from not having to physically encounter as many setbacks in fitting the piece together.

after two hours of putting it together and taking it apart and imagining where all the other hardware will fit in, i got a really bad headache. i called it a day at 5:30pm and took an aspirin nap. i am working for the next 4 days so i wont be able to put in any 10 hour days for a while. although, the work week is a great time to put on the paint. might as well wait for the paint to dry while i'm at work. that's multitasking. i still have to cut holes for the joystick, speaker, switches, and a pot. that shouldn't take too long though. i do still have to decide on a speaker to use and a color scheme. these are hard decisions. more to come.

"funbox" in production

2008-05-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

i started this project on 5-26-08. since i'm only half or maybe a quarter of the way through it, i thought id make use of this thing called blog.
day1:
after a couple weeks of slacking off and not committing to any of the ideas that i had been messing with, i decided to build another of my notorious "box toys". i finished one earlier this month as a gift for a friend. sadly, i forgot to take hi-res pics of it before giving it away, but here's a video for a reference.

ok, so i gathered up a fresh box

and a toy keyboard

the idea is to put the keyboard in the box.
then i opened up the keyboard to see what it was capable of.

after coming up with an idea of how the toy will sound, i drew up a diagram of what the interface will be like

day2:
drafted and printed templates for the holes that will be cut to fit the keys and the side panels of the box(took a long time to get it right, just had to measure to 1/4 mm!)

then i had to cut the keys and fabricate a top piece to attach the keys to the box giving the keys about 1 1/2mm clearance from the surface of the box. otherwise the surface of the keys would go below the surface of the plastic when depressed(bad action). the plastic i used for the top piece was from a side panel to an old aiwa stereo thing(great plastic!).

day3:
i cut the second hole for the first(easier)set of keys. now there are two giant holes for keys. they are extremely precise.

these are the tools i used to achieve such perfection(not pictured: scotch tape)

i then began with ideas for the side panels. after about an hour of going through scrap plastic and different ideas i came back to the aiwa plastic. (awesome plastic!)

after a lot of cutting, sanding, catastrophic mistakes and bad ideas:

i got two side panels finished(lower left, upper right). they are perfectly flush.
here are some pics of the "scotch" assemblage.

i think that's it for today. i dont think my wrists and neck can take anymore. maybe i'll cut up and rewire the circuit board tonight if i cant sleep.