The Idiot Box

Well it's time I made a noisy toy for my sister. It's her 30th birthday! So here's something fun that she will love -- and her cat will probably hate. Like a Thingamagoop, The Idiot Box is equipped with light sensors that control the sound output and light generators the "musician" can use to affect the sensors. The whole package is wrapped up nicely in a hand-carved wooden tarot card box, imported from the far-off land of eBay.

The brain is a few square-wave oscillators around a 40106B schmitt trigger IC. Two oscillators play the two notes you hear, one controls the rhythm, and the rest control the blinking lights. You can cover the corners of the box with your hand to reflect the light from the blinking LEDs back on to the light sensors, and make crazy combinations of noise. I used a similar circuit on Mike's Circuit-Bent Quellotone.

The 9-Volt Tesseract

An outer-space disco theremin! This is birthday present for my friend who loves music, has always wanted a theremin, and is pretty easy to please with bright colors and flashing lights. I've been toying with the minimum-theremin circuit for a long time, trying to create a miniature version of The Bad Hand's Imipolex G. When I finally got a stable version of the circuit, I wanted to add some big flare for my outerspace disco girlfriend! I had a leftover 4017 IC which I combined with a regular schitt-trigger IC to produce 16 LEDs flashing in luminous cacophony. The magic part is, the pitch of the theremin affects the speed of the blinky-blinky! So as you move your hand into its body, the "Tesseract" goes nuts.

Well... it worked REALLY well on the breadboard, but for some reason when I finally soldered the contraption together, it lost a big part of the effect. The pitch still does change the speed of the lights, but it is not as profound as it was on the workbench. This darn theremin circuit! It is designed to be incredibly unstable and sensitive to the environment, and so I am not too surprised that moving to a permanent circuit board changed its behavior.

I decided a nicely stained and carved up picture frame would be an ideal package for the device. Mainly, because there were these totally awesome unfinished picture frames in the art store I was standing in when I got this idea. It provides plenty of space to house the large copper plate that I used as an antenna and, most importantly, this way the "Tesseract" can easily be hung up (she has plenty of wall in her room). All the Tesseract you can expect for 9 volts. What'd you expect, a wrinkle in time?

The "Zippy Stardust" Radar-Laserbeam Goggles

As I finished mixing the Easystreet album earlier this year, I decided to show off to Michael Blitzen and Velvet Chang my light up epihone guitar. It seemed to fit with their style of outerspace disco rave nonstop sparkle sequin party. Michael was very excited and, having always wanted an angry mad bitchin' guitar solo at the end of their song Robotobahn, invited me to join them as a special guest (for about :30 seconds) during their live shows. Well, the guitar is pretty amazing but I would need more of a costume than that to join THIS act. You can check out Easystreet's music video for Robotobahn featuring Zippy Stardust rocking all the lights and more, at around 3:30...

The knight-rider LED circuit is easy to find online, and easy enough to add a few extra LEDs to the "carry-out" output of the 4017 IC at the heart of the matter. I run the circuit from a very convenient 12 V "N-size" camera battery, and a tiny wheel to control the speed of the effect hangs out from under the ear-piece. The hardest part about this build was finding a pair of "old-person glasses" big enough to house the circuit! We looked all over town, and eventually just had to buy a pair online.

Mini MesaBoogie Footswitch

Because, seriously Mesa-Boogie -- why do you need to take up so much real estate on my pedal board for only two buttons? Besides the actual footswitch switches, I had enough spare parts around to put this working miniature together. I just bought that Furman pedal board and everything is going to fit on it.

The Click Of Death! Featuring MtMS Robot Hard Drives

I can't reveal too much about how this viral video was put together for my friends at Publicis and Hal Riney (for their client SanDisk), but I did build a massive amount of robotic "puppet" hard drives. By soldering wires directly to the coil on the reader-arm, and switching the polarity on an 18V current, a controller can make these little guys DANCE! Also featured in there is a separate oscillator circuit for blinking lights on certain drives. I used phone wire all over the place, like a mile of the stuff. Because each drive needed 4 wires and because they were breaking all the time, they needed to be modular, and the jacks helped a lot. I had to drill holes through the casings to feed my tricky little wires through.

After the construction and the shoot days (special thanks to Cyrus W-W for keeping the fragile robots alive long enough for a precious few full takes) I also helped with the audio post -- although there wasn't much to do there because EVERYTHING YOU HEAR WAS (we are not making this up) ACTUALLY PRODUCED by the hard drives in the video! no joke! no kidding! for real! what...? My friend Ben Mullins, producer of the video, is the guy in photo #1 posing for a demo of the project before we got client approval.

Seizure Specs

...well ANTI-seizure specs, anyway: Sometimes at rock concerts, the flashing lights make Barrie a little sick. She doesn't have epileptic seizures or anything but definitely strobe-light-induced discomfort. Barrie's ordinary "home remedy" is holding up a cell-phone screen or other bright light right up to her eyes to drown out the strobe lights and sorta just calm down or otherwise NOT vomit and pass-out. A regular blindfold doesn't work because the stage lights are just too ferocious! SO! A plan...

Here's a pair of stunna shades grown fresh in the parking lot across the street from Amoeba on Haight st., with just enough excess plastic to hot-glue on some low-voltage medical technology. Just a switch and some painfully bright LEDs -- which I actually had to dremel-down to actually fit them between the inside of the lens and the EYEBALL!

Definitely the spookiest contraption yet.
What's everyone gunna be for Halloween?

The TIME BOMB !!

Inspired by this guy, I decided to make an analog handheld noisemaker based on thousands of tiny grains hitting a microphone element. Nothing too special here, just an amplifier and an LED-blinker. The circuit is triggered by two tilt-switches that activate when the device is upright.

I stained and carved out a wooden craft box to fit my nefarious design, and carefully superglued two piezo pickups and red LEDs into a 30-second game timer I got from the Dungeons and Dragons Store!!!

Getting everything to fit was absolutely the hardest part. That strip of electrical tape across the speaker is a gimmick to reduce most of the feedback. The only way to really kill ALL that close-proximity feedback is... video editing. So it's sort of a challenging piece. Maybe a game! There's a narrow angle where it won't shriek at you.

New MCTHFG record features Funx Capacitor

(hmmm.... looks like it also features a picture I took of some graffiti in Buenos Aires!!)
Click above to open the iTunes page and preview tracks...

The Penguin

The Latest Insanity Generator...
Here's a birthday present for my long-time buddy (his birthday was in November). It's a touch-sensitive synth built into a little guitar I bought for 100 pesos in Tijuana. It's triggered by tapping on the piezo element sealed underneath the penguin, runs for however long the decay is set, and can be modulated in different ways merely by touching the the strings... with HUMAN TISSUE !!!!!

Controls are volume, decay time, and amplitude modulation vs. frequency modulation. The last switch patches the body contacts between the main "pitch" oscillator, and the modulating "freak out" oscillator. Check out the waveform.

It took a lot of trial and error and screaming and error and error and trial to get the piezo sensor to work consistently. The other big thing was actually electrically isolating the strings from each other so that they would respond to TOUCHING and nothing else. This was done by wrapping the base of each string in plastic tube, and sealing the metal frets with an acrylic glue so they don't short out when you push the strings all the way down.

So now Jon, his seven pet monkeys, and his dog taco have a guitar they can make beautiful music with simply by cuddling with it.

Circuit Bent MARIPOSA de ARGENTINA

I just got back from my 10-day trip to Buenos Aires today... what a blast! One of our little missions was to find some sort of spanish-speaking electronic toy to infuse with some sort of electronic diablo.

This one's for DanB... and so I'm sure he'll have a marvelous composition/video ready to post for us fairly soon. New device features include 1/4" output, pitch/rate knob, distortion switch and psycho loop switch.

The Casio Quellotone

Here it is, Mike:










The Casio MT-45 circuit bent for Quell, features:
- Installed optical "theremin" with accompanying blinky light
- mute/mod switches for Hi-Hat sounds
- 4-way glitch joystick with alien filters and harmonies
- 3 body contacts for bitcrushed BROWN NOTES, special for the Reverend Moquell

There were times I thought this whole thing was wrecked. Up until the last minute, half of the keys weren't even working. At one point I was getting no audio at all -- fearing that I had crossed something hot and blown out a chip. I spent more time fixing things I'd snapped, unsoldered and burnt than I did adding new features! I couldn't resist adding the blinky opto-theremin thing either. The idea is to reflect the blinking *LAZERBEAM* back onto the photocell to make it freak out more.

SO MIKE -- the deal is, you have to post some freakout acid jams for us now. Maybe you can finally record the soundtrack to that new Unicorn-Cardiologist-Outer-Space-Western cartoon drama you've been working so hard on!

Circuit bent Electronic Storybook for AudioAngel

....AudioAngel gave me these two Sound-Effects devices from a Storybook toy. One from The Lion King, one from SPIDER-MAN!!! All she wanted was a 1/4" jack installed to play the sounds live but guess what, I found a circuit-bend point and just couldn't help myself. The copper pads on the sides are BODY-CONTACTS and the more skin they touch, the LOWER the pitch of the sound effects. VERY AWESOME and glitchy! No video for this creation, I'll let AudioAngel come up with a performance, then we can all go see her play freakedout LionKing sounds live!
...except for Quell, who's too far away.
Quell has to stay home and try to find a more insane YouTube series to top Ol' Greg

the FUNX CAPACITOR

...here's my brand new homemade analog synth, inspired by the Thingamagoop, but designed from scratch by Zippy. It's controlled by three mercury tilt-switches and of course, buttons-and-knobs. Fun to play! The sound changes as you rotate the thing. It's brain is seven square-wave oscillators: three for the "notes," three for the blinky lights, and one for the "tremolo" mod. The whole thing mounts on a round, blank circuit board and fits inside this acrylic rocks-glass I got at Lucky's!!!! 1/4" output also installed to crank-it-up and annoy the neighbors.

This was a big one. Took me about a month to finish, doing a lot of testing, learning, ordering wrong parts and re-ordering... It took a lot of science to make this happen!

also, it runs on WAY less than 2.2 Gigawatts... only 9V.

Guitar pickup. Two dollars. Radio shack parts and fifteen minutes.

The latest new device, design stage

Zippy's "YOU DECIDE" 2008

I was just given this old Red Les Paul Guitar Hero controller...
WHAT'm I gunna DO wit' IT?!?!?!


another drumitar? Some kind of freaky synth? Maybe just a light-show controlled by buttons? A water gun? A TV remote control?

you decide!
comment or email zippy
pinheadmz@gmail.com

I dunno.... if you comes up with a really killer *doable* idea, I'll make it, and you can keep it!

The Shadow Jar

A varitation of a basic photo-theremin oscillator circuit, TRAPPED IN A JAR! Only you can save the wacky noise by torturing it with light.

Please note, this device does not actually generate the sound of The Blue Angels soaring past your apartment, but it goes nuts in front of a TV screen!