HT-700 Dilema!

[SineHacker]

Aaagh, I picked up a casio HT-700 from scag-generator today for £9.99, the power input was broken, but I replaced it with one from a crappy yamaha keyboard I've been cannibalising for a while.

here's the dilema - Do I try bending it and risk frying or do I attempt to do the known mods for the analogue filters - which will potentially transform it into a fairly decent synth with intuitive controls? I can't find any documentation of anyone bending these for glitch, but I have an inkling that there is some amazing stuff hidden away in the jungle of a circuit board. What would you do?

[manufactured zero]

I bent one of these ages ago. Sadly it was back when i was still taking my first steps reading the reed ghazala book and following the instructions on a speak and spell so when i dug the ht out again months later it had stopped working. Never to be bought back. But i got the filter mods in there and some distortion if i remember right. You're right in thinking that it turned it into a half decent synth. I found a drum pitch mod too which was really cool. I'd love to find another one but they don't turn up very often.

[Circuitbenders]

Just bend the thing, what have you lost if you kill it? £10 and a synth that really isn't that good in the big scheme of things.

This is kind of like my VL1 arguement. You do some mods on that and what have you got? You've got a crappy little keyboard that makes some noises that are impressive in the context of a VL1, but are a bit crap in the real world.

If you just add the filter mods to an HT700 then you'll have something thats impressive up against what you could produce with a normal HT700, but when you consider that in the big scheme of things what you can actually do with a normal HT700 isn't that impressive in the first place, you might as well bend it to the limit of what it can do.

And when you've bent it let me know what you can do as i appear to have two of them. 

[manufactured zero]

wanna' sell one

[SineHacker]

I've had a couple of goes at probing the circuit board but I've only found some minor things like fuzz and a bend that cuts out the drums. I found one little spaz out crash but it only lasts a second then the keyboard freezes not giving up yet though!

[manufactured zero]

Try making a bending probe with a 1m pot on. Try resistance settings as you go. Most bends on Vl's and pt's are found this way as a short with no resistance often causes silence. But with a bit of trimming will give you various feedback and overdrives. I've built an 'advanced probe' with a 1m pot. a couple of ceramic cap values and a couple of electolytic caps which i can switch between to check for different effects. The pot is your key though. You'll find many more bends with some resistence experimentation. Hope this helps you find more goodies in there 

[MAGTIG]

Try making a bending probe with a 1m pot on. Try resistance settings as you go. Most bends on Vl's and pt's are found this way as a short with no resistance often causes silence. But with a bit of trimming will give you various feedback and overdrives. I've built an 'advanced probe' with a 1m pot. a couple of ceramic cap values and a couple of electolytic caps which i can switch between to check for different effects. The pot is your key though. You'll find many more bends with some resistence experimentation. Hope this helps you find more goodies in there 

Ooooh, so where and what value caps would go in the bend finder on Pete's site?

[SineHacker]

Try making a bending probe with a 1m pot on. Try resistance settings as you go. Most bends on Vl's and pt's are found this way as a short with no resistance often causes silence. But with a bit of trimming will give you various feedback and overdrives. I've built an 'advanced probe' with a 1m pot. a couple of ceramic cap values and a couple of electolytic caps which i can switch between to check for different effects. The pot is your key though. You'll find many more bends with some resistence experimentation. Hope this helps you find more goodies in there 

cheers, I did this already though - thats a good idea though setting up a probe preset box - I guess it's nearly as easy with breadboard of course

cheers!

[SineHacker]

Ooooh, so where and what value caps would go in the bend finder on Pete's site?

you would need to set up some separate buses with switches - the pots can be turned right down to have no resistance so they can be wired in series and you can choose whether you want them to effect each other or not, capacitors aren't variable so they would need to be setup separately, you could have them linked to the in/out terminals but they would need individual channels with switches to gate them on and off.

there might be a way to set it up so's the caps are in series with the pots but my brain isn't working too well at this hour!

[manufactured zero]

I can't remember the values of the ceramics as my head is on the tail end of 7 skinny red bulls and as many hours down the shed with my head stuck in a dd12. But i can tell you i have a (103) & (104) ceramic and a 1uf and 10uf (my head is fried, i think this is right, probably going senile from breathing lead or something) electro cap mounted on my bending vero board. I only use a 1m pot as i'm too stingy to use more on the probe. But each cap runs to a phono socket so if i want to try one i plug one of my probes into the coresponding jack. Each cap runs to the pot so i can play around with resistances on all of them. You find things mostly with just the pot but sometimes you'll get a noticable variation or decent effect with a cap in line......

Right, break over, back to the sanitarium    

If anyone reads this and has a (not bread bin type) c64 power pack they don't wan't i'd pay a few bob for it. Found one in the shed with a mssiah in the back of it earlier and remembered there was a point to it being there. One of those 'i'll do it tomorrow about six months ago' kind of projects  

[SineHacker]

If anyone reads this and has a (not bread bin type) c64 power pack they don't wan't i'd pay a few bob for it. Found one in the shed with a mssiah in the back of it earlier and remembered there was a point to it being there. One of those 'i'll do it tomorrow about six months ago' kind of projects  

you may be in luck, I think I have a spare, whats a bread bin type one though? got a pic?