How to Circuit Bend on a Kid's Xylophone

Video Transcript

AMANDA CLAIRE: All right. So here's another example. This was another kid's toy I got it at a thrift store. I think it was kind of like a little xylophone on wheels, you can kinda see the holes where the wheels were, and I took the wheels out and this one didn't have any switches or buttons on it but does have a lot more of these metal contacts that are connect to different places on the circuit board. So if you connect them with your own body by touching it, you act as a resistor in the circuit. You can change the pitch so something--so here's kind of the sounds that this thing would normally make by pressing this button, plays little songs like this, "Itsy Bitsy Spider," but now I've got these body contacts so I can go. So you know, that's an example of a circuit bent instrument or you know. I've also--as you can see I've got a 1/4-inch guitar jack in here. So I can plug this in to an amplifier and run it through a distortion pedal or delay pedal or reverb or anything and you can get all kinds of crazy sounds out of it. I like to kinda make them my own too, I mean, this has got--I put some of these little beads on it that have a letters on it; if you can see, it says "trilobite". I call this thing the trilobite 'cause it kinda looks like a fossil trilobite I think. You know, here the eyes, and there's the body and everything. So, the point of that is, is that circuit bending is really creative and you know, you're not just rewiring something to make it, make new sounds but a lot of people like to kinda make it look interesting too. And just really have it be kinda of this crazy instrument that really no one else has ever seen before.

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