bent/unbent

[the_zombiest]

Has anyone else come across bends that only work with the internal speaker of the toy?

I've had it happen with a super s & s, where i found a gnarly distortion which didn't work when put through an amplifier and now i've been bending a Playskool 'Maximus' toy.  I found a nice loop that worked great until i plugged it in to my amp.

The really odd thing about the maximus toy, is that i removed the original speaker.  The loop worked with my headphones but not my amp.  is it down to the fact that an amp is powered and headphones are not?  it's vexing me tonnes.

[Circuitbenders]

Could be something to do with breaking the ground circuit i.e the amp has a ground and your headphones don't, or if you removed the speaker try putting a 8ohm dummy load across where is should be, some cheap machines appear to actually use the speaker as part of the circuit.

[migraneboy]

I was bending a very small barbie keyboard with a small speaker, when I suddenly heard this awesome distortion sound.
I was surprised cos I thought I had done nothing, and tried for a few minutes to figure out how this new effect came to be..

well, then I noticed that a short piece of wire was stuck to the speaker and was resonating on its surface. haha, very funny.

But the sound was really cool and I could make some phaser effects by moving the wire around.

Of course you can´t get the sound out from the line out, but I sometimes mic these things anyway. I had forgot about this by the way.. have to get to some experimenting with different speakers and materials.