A TRIO OF FURRY BASTARDS
This page is dedicated to three soft toys that we bent a while back but didn't get around to putting up on the site. First up we have two fluffy RSPB birds that apparently produce 'genuine bird song' when you squeeze them. Well, that may have been true once but since then we have done some fairly radical surgery on them.
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The internal squeezing switches have been removed and replaced with a trigger button in an external control box on a metre of cable. The control box also houses a 'bird song pitch knob' (patent applied for) and a pitch warbler body contact that adds a kind of sick modulation to the sounds when you touch it. The birds also feature a 1/4 inch jack line out placed in the most indelicate position possible.
The actual sounds produced sound not a million miles away from some kind of mentally ill 8 bit R2D2 along with plenty of nasty aliasing noise and bending tones. These were a custom bend for someone that appeared to be trying to create some kind of Village Of The Damned dawn chorus affair.
The third toy we have for your consideration is a 'Letter Glow Alfie'. This is essentially a V-tech talking phonics style educational toy but mounted inside a teddy bear with a big set of touch sensitive buttons on its stomach and some extra stuff on its paws. It has a fairly standard set of words but also has some excellent sound effects and out of the ordinary demo tunes, some of which seem to feature a selection of squelchy acid tones. Unlike a lot of V-Tech toys this machine has very high quality circuitry and sampling which means the sounds stay more or less intact as you pitch them down rather than dissappearing under a mountain of aliasing noise as you get with lower quality toys.The main problem with this thing is getting the little bastard to shut up. For some reason we seem to have lost the main photos so heres a couple we have left.
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The mods consist of just a pitch knob and a 1/4 inch jack line out both mounted on the back of the head for maximum Borg effect. Click on the button for a demo mp3.