Mike Walters Does It Again: Yamaha Keyboard + Heathkit = Mike-O-Wave
By bohus
Mike Walters has performed all kinds of audio alchemy under the guise of Mystery Circuits. Using electronic toys and outmoded keyboards as his starting point, he finds new ways of shorting out those mini battery-powered brains to create oddly random audio. There are lots of people devoted to the pursuit of "circuit bending", but Mike manages to create instruments with both performance and aesthetics in mind.
Check out the Mike-O-Wave (I had to say it out loud before I got the joke...) demo video Mike posted on YouTube. This newest instrument fits the guts of a Yamaha PSS-140 toy FM synthesizer into an old Heathkit Experimenter enclosure. The soft-touch control panel is very low tech: a laminate sandwich of office labels and construction paper! A grid of tactile switches control the keyboard's original functions, as well as some well known mods found on the internet.
Mike has been on these pages before with his all Walkman Mellotron, and I've seen the circuit-bent keyboard that he built for Devo in action. He seems to premiere a couple new instruments every year, so let's all look forward to what's in store for 2009!
related:
The Art of Circuit Bending Book
New circuit bent electro gadgets By Mike Ford
Chronovalve circuit bent instruments
