After a mildly successful attempt at circuit bending
wednesday night (at least till I fried the toy keyboard I was playing with) I decided to
hit the thrift stores and see if they had any fun electronic toys to munge.

After not initially seeing anything, a bit more digging revealed lots of
potential candiates. Hit a couple of thrift stores, and the “Indoor Flea Market
Mall” and found plenty. 22 in total, all but one of which appear to actually
be in good working order. However, riding around with a couple bags
fille with electronic toys, many of them with batteries is a bit odd, as
everytime you turn or accellerate, one or more of the toys starts making
noises.

Since I seem to be on an electronics kick at the moment, I figured
I’d swing by Edwin Mckay used books and see if they had any
electronics books. Someone was out to taunt me, as the store
had moved. And at the new store, for whatever reason, virtually
every shelve was labeled “electronics”, regardless of what
was actually on it. Must of purchased the shelves from somewhere
else. Eventually found the actual electronics books (all 6 of them).
Picked up one or two that looked interesting.

Headed over to badger‘s place Sunday to play a bit.
Took a relatively stripped down setup (stick, a phaser, a eq/boost,
and the line6 dl-4). First bit was me playing some simple chords
though the reverse delay. Second set badger created a loop
of bowwed stick as a pulse, and I played mostly riffs based around
ascending flat fifths, with badger playing nice distorted stick.

Third bit was the most wandering, and the least conventional,
but probabaly the most interesting. Both of us more or less
playing tabletop stick, but wandering though lots of areas.
Some nice loops, long delays, some very ambient washes
punctuated with various underwatery blips and beeps, and
ended up with some nice melodic counterpoint.

Came home, decided to try bending one of the keyboards I
picked up saturday. Picked one, and went at it. Some
sucess (modified it a bit, and managed to get it back together
and working). Added a pot for pitch control. some contacts
for vibrato/pitch dive, and a 1/8in jack to plug it into an amp.