Circuit bent bliptronic 5000 from thinkgeek

[Gleix]

Circuit Bent Bliptronic 5000 glitchy grid synth




This was a pain in the ass to put back together, but I'm happy with the end result.

5 switches and two knobs are all that would fit but they are:

- Switch: Causes fuzz and turns all grid lights on, along with engaging semi-random notes in a row when a button in the row is pressed
- 4 switches: Engage an entire row of notes. Any row would've been possible but for practically I wired up switches that would like up C E G C to make an arpeggio.
- Distortion knob... sounds almost identical to casio SA series distortions
- Starve/crash knob

And because I know I'll be asked and sharing bending information is generally PART OF MY BENDING PHILOSOPHY AND I'M NOT ONE TO KEEP EVERYTHING TO MYSELF COUGHS-CATCOUGHCOUGH:

[To the best I can describe/remember without opening the thing back up]

The arpeggio switches go from a speaker terminal as the common point to the different points on the little connector between circuit boards which run to the rows of the button matrix. The common point on different points on the connector points will engage different rows, and one of them causes the "all lights on/fuzz/glitch" thing.

The distortion goes from a point coming from the blob chip labelled OUTL and then to C4. It's a surface mount capacitor. Use a 100k pot from OUTL to C4 (that has a trace running to a point next to 3 other points in a row off to the side of the board). I hope that's easy to follow.

The starve is just a 1K pot between the negative terminal. An even lower value pot would yield better results but aren't always the easiest the find and I didn't have anything lower than 1K lying around.

I'd recommend anybody who plans on bending one of these to:

1. Be very careful, I fried an IC by not being careful the first time and it became basically useless. This was my second one.

2. Make a breakout box rather than mounting the controls on the synth itself... There's lots more inside of this thing but had to just keep what I thought were the best bends since there wasn't enough room for almost anything else :/

Enjoy! :]

[Circuitbenders]

good work, i'm really liking the distortion on that. The lack of space in there looks like a nightmare.

Do you have any idea what the synthesis engine is in there? Or is it just sample playback?

[Bogus Noise]

Funny timing, came across a thread on this at electro-music.com last night!

http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-39167.html&postorder=asc&highlight=bliptronic&start=25

Apparently the sound generator is inside the black blob and is sample playback, but there's some more discussion there that might come in handy.

[Gleix]

good work, i'm really liking the distortion on that. The lack of space in there looks like a nightmare.

Do you have any idea what the synthesis engine is in there? Or is it just sample playback?

According to getlofi it's just sample playback :/

[SineHacker]

wish we could get em in the uk, they're only like $50 right?

[Gleix]

wish we could get em in the uk, they're only like $50 right?

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/musical-instruments/c4e1/ Yeah - they do ship internationally, though. I just imagine it might cost a bit.

On a side note, the "link" ports respond to trigger outputs from various devices which makes things incredibly easy & much more fun to toy with. Here's a short little thing with a 606:

Roland TR-606 sync with circuit bent bliptronic 5000

[ghd]

Not circuit bending per se but just a note- bliptronics now has a conversion kit to transform it into a monome clone
I got a retro kit on the way to try it out.
link : http://www.straytechnologies.com/bliptronome-v2-tests-kits-and-code-released/

[-N-]

Thanks for posting this! Just got my BT5K today and implemented your distortion/feedback bend with a 100k slide pot. Loving the results!