Video: Learn About Body Contacts for Circuit Bending

Learn about body contacts for circuit bending in this video series that will help you understand how and when to utilize this unique way of making music.

Video Transcript

LORIN EDWIN PARKER: This is one of my favorite ways to control a circuit bending instrument which is using body contacts. And we found earlier that by touching the circuit board with my finger or my thumb or by touching leads coming off of the circuit board that I can change the sound. And I just want to reassure everybody that there is no way with consumer batteries that I'm going to actually shock myself or feel any of these. What's happening is just, I'm changing the potentials in the circuit rather than actually conducting a lot of electricity. My body does become a part of the circuit but you don't feel anything. You're not conducting electricity through your body. It's just kinda scattering across your skin and changing the reactions in here. So what we're going to do is we need to connect this up to something that's a little bit more durable than a wire. You could have two wires sticking out of there but we people like to do--what I like to do the most is use nails. Most nails are coated in zinc, which means that we can solder to them. If you find an aluminum nail you're not going to be able to solder to it but I can coat a little blob of solder on my nail and this time I probably want a nice large blob, and then likewise, I can tin my wire here and thumbtacks work really well especially brass thumbtacks. And now I just melt these two together. Whoops! My hands are a little shaky today, but there it goes. It's pretty solid. So now, take this off my little clip and it's a little bit warm right now but now I can touch the nail and the wire. And what's really great about this is it senses how hard I'm touching it. If I barely touch it, I get this, but if I really clamp down, this is what happens. So as I let go, more pressure, less pressure. So the goal is once we close this back up to have these nails or thumbtacks or you can use buttons off of an old coat, metallic buttons, anything that you can solder to brass or zinc, and then have those as the touch points that you use to interact with the instrument.

Learn About Body Contacts for Circuit Bending

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