J. Anthony Allen teaches circuit bending, the art of rewiring toys and electronics for new sounds. He'll modify a $3.99 SpongeBob toy keyboard with four switches and compose a full track on it, requiring no electronics experience, just curiosity and willingness to experiment.
Circuit bending has a long history and there's actually some really interesting books on it. I encourage you to check those because it is gonna be attached. So we're gonna kind of gently move it aside. This first store I went to, I'm now in the game section. Sometimes these games can be really fun. You can find cool stuff. Like this is where you might find like speak and spells, which are probably the most of the time. What I'm looking for is a group of stuff. Like I think there's good stuff here. So that means that if you do something wrong. Now let me preface this by saying this is unl. Hey everyone. So in this class we're going to be talking about circuit bending. So if you don't know what circuit bending is, basically what that means is we're going to take something that already exists. We're going to some kind of electronic sound making thing, we're going to open it up, we're going to connect some extra wires that's going to give us a couple extra switches and knobs, and we're gonna make that thing make crazy sounds that it was not intended to make. And with that, we're gonna do some really cool musical stuff with it. So throughout this course, I am going to circuit bend something. I'm gonna start off by showing you my big circuit bending project, my big keyboard, which is this one. So on this keyboard I have about a hundred bends. There's about 50 switches here that I've added. About 50 switches here that I've added. All of those extra switches create tons of extra sounds not in the keyboard. So I've opened it up, I've added all kinds of stuff and then I put it back together, adding all those switches. Now what we're going to do in this class is going to be slightly smaller scale. What we're going to do is I'm going to take this SpongeBob SquarePants keyboard and I'm going to add these four switches. Now, as you might be able to tell, I always film this intro lecture after I've done the whole course. So when we start the course, these switches are not going to be here. They're going to be added later throughout the course. We're going to open this thing up, we're going to connect some wires, and we're going to add these switches that are going to make really cool sounds out of our spongebob squarepants keyboard. So I bought this at a thrift store for a couple dollars, 399 to be exact. I'm gonna walk you through that. I'm actually gonna take the camera into the thrift store and covertly film myself shopping so I can tell you what kind of thing to get. I'm gonna do all of that in this course. So we're gonna go from beginning to end, from selecting something to circuit bend every step of the way to ending up with the finished product. And then at the very end, I'm actually gonna make a track using this thing. And. And it's the track you're hearing right now. That Track is composed 100% on this keyboard, my SpongeBob SquarePants keyboard, after some slight modifications. So if circuit bending freaks you out, it doesn't need to. It's actually really simple. I was shocked at how easy it is once you know a couple basic principles about doing. Doesn't take any knowledge of how electricity works, how circuitry works, anything. It's really all about experimenting. So we're going to open it up, and then we're just going to start experimenting, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. So I hope you join us in the class. It's going to be super fun. We go from having nothing to ending up with this cool keyboard. And if you follow along with every class, you will end up with this really cool circuit bend toy of your own. So let's jump in, let's jump into the course and get started right away with our first basic things that we need to know. I'll see you inside.
