Where’s the Party At is an open source bendable 8-bit sampler kit created by [Todd Bailey]. The initial design started about a year ago when he was instructing circuit benders how to transition to circuit design. He designed the kit to show how simply you could build a sampler. It demonstrates both clear analog and digital design. It’s meant to be a unique instrument though and features a lot of glitchy/quirky characteristics while being fairly reliable. You can read more about the device on his site. It has comprehensive parts and assembly manuals available and the kit is $75.
[via Create Digital Music]
nice looking project, be a pretty good project to fill a few hours, although $75 per kit seems a little steep, think it’d be more fun putting it onto a project board or diy pcb
Bendable circuit? That board doesn’t look flexible at all.
My thoughts exactly steve!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending
looks neat, although I’m having trouble finding details/demonstrations. perhaps it’s the 1993 style web site. text – hr – pic – hr – text, etc…
wouldn’t mind to see a video, or at least a sound clip.
looks pretty sweet though. $75 doesn’t seem steep considering how powerful of a sampler it seems. It has a boatload of features and looks pretty damn awesome.
from the circuit bending wikipedia article:
“some see circuit bending as a more spiritual process. in the popular video ‘what is circuit bending?’ artists describe circuit bending as ‘parallel worlds within a circuit that aren’t supposed to exist, but they’re there’…’an explosive psychedelic surreal world of sound.'”
i want to vomit.
I fixed that temporarily Nov 16, 2011
So many circuit bending noobs <.<
On a side note, flex-itx never did make it that big…
@andrew lol, seriously.
@andrew,
yeah that’s pretty damned awful. i guess circuit bending *could* be a psychedelic and spiritual experience … with the right amount of lsd.
the less popular wikipedia articles are quite vulnerable to weirdo interpretations.
For all I know, that circuit board could’ve just come out of the guy’s neighbour’s old VCR. Without a video or at least a freakin’ audio sample, what’s the point?
if you take the time to look at his website, you’ll find the videos. they’re old though and shows older revisions of the board, but you can clearly see it’s not from a vcr.
http://narrat1ve.com/images/WTPA_095_vs_The_Knife.mpg
http://www.narrat1ve.com/images/WTPA.mp4
ok, i have always been down on circuit benders that don’t know about the electronics that they torture. today I eat those words, I looked through the pages on this guy, and even though i still don’t think it’s music, this project has immense potential. This gentleman understands electronics and has proven that to me(in all honesty, he’s more advanced than i am), I only hope that he posts videos or samples from someone who is equally accomplished in music as he is in electronics, that would shut me up for good on this point. wait and see.
I tried building stuff on acid. It all blew up.
It was a stupid experiment. -but the _colors_, children the _colors!_
A-hey
@sidthetaff $75 steep? i was personally surprised at how inexpensive it was. do you even know what it does? what kind of kits do you buy or use for price reference?
A circuit designed to be bent? Isn’t that kind of like a server designed to be hacked?
to ken: what better way to bend than to use something designed to. and knowing what you want allows you to tailor the circuit to your needs.
now that i think about it, what would be better than a server designed to be hacked, if you designed it, imagine all the practice you could get cracking it and then writing new software to protect it. that’s a pretty good idea too, good job.
I’ve been waiting for someone to make a kit like this for some time now, and this one seems perfect.
I’ve seen casio sk’s sell for more than $75 on ebay, so this kit is really a very reasonable price.
Circuit bending is great fun and very satisfying, but learning how the technology actually works will be a very useful in circuit bending.
Yep, I’m sold.
video of said sampler in action…
http://www.vimeo.com/5248566
bought one thanks for the above video adam
going to put it all together and post back!
c’mon guys. Reed Ghazala designs circuits to bend. He designs and builds them to theory, then has his way with them. That’s what this guy is doing. I just got mine in the mail, and I will do the same, without all of the painstaking work that it took to design, test, edit, test, edit, test, and finally, put this out. Don’t hate, participate!