Circuit-bending article

I’ve just discovered this article on Reed Ghazala – http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar00/articles/ghazula.htm who seems to be the daddy of circuit bending. What is interesting in the article, and from what I’ve found out so far, is the key seems to be to hack cheap, electronic toys. Firstly there’s the cost, it’s a lot less painful frying a cheap toy than an expensive Moog, but also there’s safety to consider. Toys tend to have low voltages and so you are less likely to get an electric shock than if you hacked a mains powered gizmo.

Reed also has a fantastic definition of circuit-bending. He sums it up as “Circuit-bending is the electronic art of the implementation of the creative audio short-circuit” – poetry!!