vtech ready to read robot (pitch bend questions)

[tinycat]

I'm relatively new to circuit bending audio (have mainly been experimenting with video). I just found this vtech laptop and I'm really excited about it. I found the resistor controlling the clock speed and was hoping to do both a pitch down and a pitch up.  What would be the best way of going about this?  I was thinking just an on-off-on switch between two pots maybe? How would I wire that?

[Circuitbenders]

How are you picturing a pitch up and pitch down pot working, and why not just have one pot that covers the whole range?

I'm just trying to get my head around what you mean.

[tinycat]

One would be lower and slower and one would be faster and higher. That's the best way I can explain it. Sorry if that still doesn't make since. Would one pot provide enough range between the two? I think I'm just afraid it wouldn't be enough with just one.

[SamVsSound]

Typically one pot is all you need, if you are not getting enough range you can try experimenting with a higher value pot to give added range.

Another method to get extra range is to create a voltage divider. Typically there will be one of the two pitch bend points which is the main point, if you connect this to the middle pin of the pot and connect the other point to one of the outside pins of the pot then connect the remaining outside pin on the pot to ground. This will give you substantial range with a relatively small potentiometer however it only works on some toys.

One other thing to mention is I have encountered toys (including a Vtech apple which is the only Vtech I've done) where the pitch control resistor only gave me pitch up control and I had to find other methods to pitch down

I have bent toys where I used two knobs (one up and one down) but this was usually when there where two separate sets of bend points for pitch up and pitch down. Doing so with a single pitch resistor would get complicated.

Hope that helps

[tinycat]

SamVsSound, that is super helpful! Thank you so much!

[SamVsSound]

My pleasure