My First Contribution - Drum Toy

[tbone]

I've been circuit bending things now for about two years. I regularly visit this site and have learnt so much from these forums but have not yet posted so I thought I'd start sharing things with people in the hope I could provide anything remotely worthwhile/useful. It wouldn't be fair for me just to take the knowledge here and not try and give anything back now would it.

I've bent plenty of things which I'm sure users here have seen/bent hundreds of already (casio sa's, yamaha dd's etc) and the only reason I'm putting this up is because I just finished it and quite like it.

I bought this kids drum toy from from a charity shop for £2 about a year ago. I played with it a bit but got bored of it just repeating the same songs over and over again and put it in my 'on hold' pile while other projects got under way. What with all the bank holidays recently and awaiting a parts delivery for some pedals I'm building I decided to have a crack at my on hold pile and see if I could get anything good out of what I had there.
Apart from swapping the pitch resistor and and distortion type glitch (that I found whilst probing with a capacitor) I couldn't find much on it so I probed around with a 555 based LFO. I found some hidden bass and guitar type sounds that would play along if a song was playing or just work as an independent sound if I left the song buttons alone. So I hooked the LFO up to trigger 4 sounds so you can use it without having to play the inbuilt songs.

Here is a quick demo:

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23723031?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;autoplay=1" width="398" height="224" frameborder="0"></iframe>



At first I wasn't that keen on this but after playing with it for a while I've become quite fond. With the LFO triggering the independent noises it can play some nice noisy, atmospheric, basic drum tracks.