Benders.

Circuit bending - the noble art of licking electronic devices until their souls scream for mercy in shrill, upsetting tones. It's probably best explained by the short Absurdity.biz documentary below:



Having established what it is, how does one go about it?

Well, first you'll need something powered by batteries that makes sound. Kids toy electric guitars, drum machines and keyboards are a good start, as are Speak & Spells, Furbies and a host of other noisy toys. Hell, you could even do it with one of those annoying musical greetings cards.

Next you'll need to open it up, exposing the circuits.

Then the abuse can begin.

There's a superb step-by-step guide at the Anti-Theory site.

Another great guide at CircuitBenders.co.uk.

Dozens of inspirational creations from Tim Kaiser at Atomic Sonic.

Bendtronics sells kits and stuff, but also has a series of excellent free video tutorials.

And the Get Lo-Fi blog has loads of great articles and links.



"But I'm frightened of batteries, ever since I licked one and it made my tongue feel funny!"

Oh well, perhaps circuit bending just ain't for you. Don't cry about it.

In fact, for the faint of heart there are some cheeky alternatives out there, ways to get the bent sound without ripping the heart out of a single Texas Instrument.

This obviously goes against many of the purist principals of bending, where abandoning the chaotic creation process through buying pre-made kits and devices is frowned upon. But there you go.

MusicObject friend and all round talented geezer De La Mancha has created 'Bent' - a circuit bent style VST resynthesis effect.

He says the plugin "will recreate the incoming audio into an approximation of itself using a waveform-morphing audio oscillator. Depending on the volume and pitch of the audio, it will gate, stutter and morph the output in sync with your host tempo". And you know what? He's not wrong.

Like all DLM creations, this works well and sounds great.










Berrtill is a bizarre sound-mangling distortion plugin from Shuriken.se, modeled on a circuit-bent toy. The signal path goes through a car speaker to a kazoo, to a tape recorder, followed by a toy microphone and finally a toy amp. The controls allow you to adjust the thresholds of various parameters and to mess with the signal path.

You really should read the manual to get a feel for it.

See a video of the real-world device:



Tonebytes have created a software synth that does a pretty good emulation of a circuit-bent device.

Bend Box "can be useful for making experiments and for creating various noise FX. All knobs can be tweaked manually or thru easily assignable MIDI controllers. MIDI Automation is also available.

With Bend Box you can get wide range of noises: from the soft gurgling to ringing grinding, or even strange melodical timbres."




Bitboy from Darkware is another free plugin that promises the sound of "all your old consoles,fried by lightning". We haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but it looks good.



If samples are more your thing, there are some goodies to be had for free.

There's a bundle of great Speak & Spell sounds (both bent and unbent) at Webiocosm.

The Freesound Project has a good pack by evilpaul.

mimu.eu has some good packs here and here, including a broken 303 and a bent noise machine.

Roil Noise has some blinders including samples of a Yamaha PSR-12 keyboard, a Casio CTK-550 keyboard and a Roland DR-550 drum machine here.

And finally, Steve over at Haunted House Records has some sample packs in his Free Stuff section, check out the Electronic Critters pack.

After all this talk of bending, why not listen to some tunes made with circuit-bent kit?

Circuitbenders.co.uk has some.

There's a free album from Get Lo-Fi here.

And Noise Koncept has a wonderful compilation called 'The Bent Life' here.