My Beloved Casio

I've been wire bending my casio sk-1 ever since I got for !THREE DOLLARS! at the thread shed (a consignment store) in my hometown about 3 years ago. The thing is a beast. Even without breaking it open you can sample, do simple synthesis, and midi sequence with the little plastic thing. Once you do break it open its just a god damn gold mine. Touching the thing wont give you much more then an electrical buzz but once your do some carefull connecting you an aligator clip or some leads you can really get some good sounds. From messing around with it a little over the years and especially in class I've learned alot about it. The best way to manipulate the sounds or drum beats that it can produce is to mess with the big chips (larger versions of the ones we use in class) located all the way to the right. When you connect the very first one to any of the others it changes the sound or beat in an extremely managable way. Often it won't throw it out of pitch or time signature with only one connection. This multiplies the kind of sounds you can make on the thing by about a million. Just last night I only used one alligator clip connection to make a synth that had two pitches that played in a rhythm everytime I played a key. Pressing another key would produce another two tones in the same rhythm. The best thing was that you could play a certain sequence of keys to actually make a traditional melody that was made more complicated by the switching pitches. I added this over some simple hip hop drums to make a pretty dirty and slightly sick sounding beat. This is one of the best things about the casio, you can definently get the thing to scream noise, but you can also manage it well to keep things more traditionaly musical. As far as chaos goes you can connect one of the headphone output circuts into a circut comming from the key's that will make everything distort and fall out of pitch and time. This is beautiful, you can press the keys and they won't listen at all but rather will play random screaming noises. You play drum beats while this connection is on and the individual drum sounds will play at completely random times and as you add more connections on the chips as before more and more unique sounds will find their way into the drum pattern. Lastly you can minipulate the speed of this pattern by simply turning screw controllers on the keyboard's clocks. It has one for both large speed/pitch adjustment and small tweaking.

Electric Mic

The second or third week of class we created a cheap and portable electric microphone. It wasn't too hard to construct, and it consisted of a single electric mic that can be purchased online from radioshack or other sources. If I remember correctly the price was about 5 dollars which is suuuuuuuper cheap for a mic. I have a couple low end professional ones and they both cost 80 dollars a piece. Anyway to make this thing run all we had to do was wire it to a 9 volt battery and do some power manipulating with a resistor and a capacitor. This kept the power running into the mic at a level that made it work correctly. We then wired the output into a 1/8 inch jack to plug it into our portable amps. I've been wondering what happens when you run power incorrectly into it but apparently the outcome is bad. Not good bad either, which is a dissapointment. I've had alot of ideas about how to use these mics. Mostly, I want to make alot of them, maybe around ten, and mic up an entire room. You could put one on each wall, and a few on the ceiling and floor. It would be good to have one in each corner of the room as well so maybe more then ten would be even better. You would probablly have to set the gain pretty low on each mic to reduce noise, but you may be able to get a very very satisfying hiss comming from all of them as well. You would have to use long wire on the outputs but you could run them all into a small mixer to tweak the levels. Then you could run output of this small mixer into a larger mixer, into a mono or stereo channel. From there the limits are endless. You could record guitars, vocals, drums or whatever and pick up the sound of all around the room. The room's little vibrations and its acoustics would also get picked up. Personally I would use it to try to get a really really huge guitar sound, or just to spice up rock recordings with a better room sound. It would also be super benificial to vocal recording, Instead of holding a mic like I usualy have to in my makeshift studio without a mic stand I could simply wear my headphones and sing from whatever part of the room I felt sounded the best. I could even move around in the mic-field and probablly get a weird effect out of it. As far as drums go I think they would sound extremely Lo-Fi but beautiful, If you could fiddle with the eq to get the bass and snare to stick out just right I think you could get some great crap sounding drums. Like poorly recorded punk drumming, or maybe an ancient 40's sounding trap set sound. The best thing about this idea is that is do able for cheap, I already have to mixers and all I need now are enough little electric mics, 9 volt batteries, and compacitors + resistors.

electric mike

I thought we were building a cheap condenser mike but it was in fact an electric mike. We had few resistors and capacitors , few input plugs and mike recording head bought and with few connections with additional battery power we built an electric mike. I doubt we even spent $ 5 for that mike , even less however that was the cheapest but big thing to be building by your self.

I am planning to have more such mikes built however the quality of recording seemed to be little effected by hiss sound. however with few adjustment I think I can build a good mike indeed

Contact mikes

This mike is one of the easiest to built. For every ones surprise it was a speaker part in the begenning when it was connected to the amplifier as an input source, It turned out to be a well usuable contact mike. I tried to record normal precussive sounds and It did record good but what intriged me was it was very good cheap source of under water miking. Just try recording the contact mike under the water, It will give you whole new dimension of sound.