How to Probe Electronics for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

"LORIN PARKER: We're talking about circuit bending. Now, we're actually going to look for these bend points. We're going to look for the places that we can connect up wires and change the tone of this toy and turn it into a weird electronic musical instrument. Our primary tool is going to be the alligator clips. Now, I find that my fingers are a little bit big and even the alligator clips are a little bit big for probing so what I do is just take some standard, little picture hanging nails and stick them on either end of an alligator clip and start just short-circuiting things across here. We've already tried it with a finger but what happens if we make a direct wire connection? If I touch both solder blobs, we can see that we kinda--we cut out the sound. Then what if I touch different points together? It restarted it there. And then if I connect those two points, we get what we call a glitch point or a loop point where it starts getting stuck in a feedback loop and it plays the same thing over and over again. So, I just start to make note that this blob right down here connected up with this one over here is going to create my looping effects. Likewise, we can see if we get anything weird over here. This little black dot in the middle indicates probably the digital heart of this circuit, what's making, what's storing all the information. So, usually starting around here and then moving outward is a good approach but you want to kinda probe all of these and you can just move randomly. There we got something that cut it out. There we have something that adds some static to it. I think though, probably the best responses I found so far is this glitch right--where was it? And this can be the difficulty, finding all of my little points. We've got that pitch bend area there and then we've got this--and that always seems to happen with circuit bending. Every once in a while you'll overwhelm it and you'll need to restart it. So, I just go over to the other side, I hit the 'on' button again and I'm back in business. So, basically apply these alligator clips wherever you can. Try and find as many points that do something. Just with alligator clips, you're probably going to find places where it loops and glitches or where sound cuts out or where sound speeds up. Getting the nuances in between is a later stop. But just explore every single possibility, just connecting up each one of those solder blobs with an alligator clip to short circuit it. That's the first step in circuit bending. "