Circuit Locution

Archive for May, 2008

Quick music sample

Monday, May 12th, 2008

I’ve only gotten 3 bends fully wired up on the PSS-460, because I’ve been having too much fun playing it.

The bends so far are two distortion bends that also tend to have input on other bends when they’re turned on.

The third bend is one of a group of bends that together make up what I’ve dubbed ‘Ornery Mode’. They cause the cpu/sound chip to ignore keyboard input, and react unpredictably when not ignoring input. The result can be bizarrely ambient, but is quite Aleatronic.

Sample:
PSS-460 Session 1

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Bending a PSS-460: Wiring up a breadboard

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

In part 2 I examined some bend points. There were so many good ones on the sound chip, I’ll spend some time connecting the chip to an external breadboard to make adding more bends easier.

Preparing a ribbon cable
In the past, I’ve done several bends where each bend gets a wire to the pin. Instead, I’m going to attach a ribbon cable to each side of the sound chip. Conveniently, ribbon cables are available for cheap – I’m using a cable for a floppy drive.
First, cut off the connector. Then, count out twice as many wires as you have pins (I have 12 pins per side, so I’ll be using 24 strands of the cable) and tear off the extra. It should tear easily.
Next, strip the odd-numbered wires (counting the red-marked wire as 1) and cut the even-numbered wires shorter. We won’t be using the even-numbered wires; they’re just there to act as a spacer. Don’t strip off too much insulator; you only need a couple millimeters of bare wire to solder a joint and keeping it short will reduce the chance of (unwanted) short circuits.