Learn About Safety Tips for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

LORIN PARKER: We're talking about circuit bending and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about safety and the fragility of circuits that are bent. Now first, personal safety. Right here, we have the earmarks of circuit-bent stuff. Most people will tell you that anything circuit-bent should be done with batteries. Now, this is not universally true. Some experts can use higher-powered circuits but for anybody embarking on this journey of circuit bending and creating their first electronic instrument, always use battery-powered instruments. Always use battery-powered toys or devices to bend. Now, I've got my AAs here, these are contained in a nice battery case for me. I've got a 9-volt. Any battery you can think of that you can buy at your local drugstore is going to be fine. I prefer rechargeables because it helps save the environment and it helps save cost when you're using a lot of batteries. The trick is that unlike one of these wall wart power plugs that converts AC down to a lower voltage or especially unlike the full-on power plug, a battery doesn't have enough energy to actually give you a significant zap. And it certainly doesn't have enough energy to hurt you, burn you, or kill you. These, however, do. And you should leave the toys and the devices that plug into the wall to people who are a little bit more expert. And you might reach that point one day but for now, just batteries. That brings me to the second point which is that these batteries are powerful enough sometimes, unfortunately, to destroy the toys or the circuit-bent objects that you're working on. I think that's one of the exciting things. So, if you're going to a thrift store and you're going to get something to bend and make it sound really cool, I suggest that you get a couple of things because maybe one is going to work really well, maybe the other one is not going to work at all, maybe the third might short circuit the battery and then the device is going to go "poof" and never work again. It's that fragility, it's that unexpected result, it's the joy of not knowing exactly what's going to happen that makes the process so exciting in circuit bending. Not just the result which is creating a great, new musical instrument or sound.

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