This used to be a toy electric guitar. I grabbed it from a second hand store ages ago, tore it up, and sort of blindly connected things together until it made some odd noises. Those were the days when circuit bending was just at the peak of its internet popularity, and as a bored suburbanite teenage nerd, I daydreamed of making my own bleeps and bloops.
The case is wonky and weirdly cut, and some of the switches are floating up out of their mountings, and it sounds plenty strange. I really didn’t know how or where to obtain sensible building materials and tools at that time, so I ended up using whatever happened to be available. The sides of the box, if I remember correctly, are from an orange crate, and the top is made from some old vinyl records. As it turns out, records are actually kind of great for mounting electronics to.
My favourite feature of the device has got to be the short voice recordings that it plays every once in a while. Occasionally, while the toy is turned on, a cheerful woman’s voice will say things like “Hi! Let’s play!” and “Follow the magical, musical lights!”. It’s terrifying and pretty great.
I’ll post a video soon – in the meantime check out these sample recordings:
#1. The box on its own:
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#2. Adding some effects/looping to the creepy voice lady:
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#3. More effects on top of raw noisebox sounds:
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