Beginning Bender

[telstarmagikistferrari]

I'm just sort of starting over bending stuff.. I did a couple things a year or two ago without a whole lot of concrete success (read: finished projects) but had some fun. I recently was able to bend a simple keyboard, adding a distortion pot, and another strange sort of stuttering/distortion control. Doesn't sound like much but there are some sweet spots using both of them that are pretty cool. This is encouraging so I wanna get back into bending. I have a couple simple questions:

1. What are good resistor values for searching for bends? It seems like straight wires often cut out the sound completely, while larger resistors don't allow anything thru. Is there a common value or two or three for searching for bends? What do you start with? What are good values for pots to buy?

2. Do capacitors ever come into play with bending? I've seen little or no references to such so I'm guessing generally not.

3. How do you go about finding the bends in general? Do you find seemingly 'active' points and go from there to explore other connections or do you systematically go thru each possibility?

Thanks to all for reading and (hopefully) answering these questions.. I realize there might be different opinions on these and I'd love to hear them all. I plan to post some audio and pics of my first bend in the next day or so, despite its rather pedestrian qualities.

[electri-fire]

When probing point to point with wires a 1K resistor inserted is a good value to start with.

But first, to find possible bend points it is custom to explore the circuitboard with a moist finger ( on battery powered devices only!). This gives a good indication of where potential bends, pots or touch contacts may be used.

Reed Ghazala the "Nestor of Circuitbending" has a tutorial ( see if you can find it, his site is huge) .
http://www.anti-theory.com/bio/
There's nice circuitbending tutorials at youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=circuit+bending+tutorial&aq=f

Especially the expert village tutorials are fun and informative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im5WeXppGlE&NR=1

[electri-fire]

Good potmeters to have are 10K, 500K, 1M. Capacitors can be used, good to have are (maybe, anything goes really) 0.1uF and larger. Inserting LEDs can be fun. You will need normally closed momentary switches to temporarilly shut of power (reset).
And loads of spdp switches, rotary switches are good to have later on. There's more, but this will do for now.

[Uncle Krunkus]

Caps are great as they allow you to send AC from one point to another, without shorting the points with respect to DC. Shorting out points with anything less than 1K is skating on thin ice as far as permanently damaging the object in question is concerned. Caps, however, enable quite small AC signals to pass without much chance of releasing the magic smoke.

[stolenfat]

a few intersting things i always try when bending are:

1. input signals- some audio or other voltages, hook up another jack and try bending the hot node into random parts of the circuit. Some you can get really lucky and find external sources can do something things to your bendable. remember to always ground it. its always double cool to hook all your bendables up in a row

didnt find anything? try using a vactrol!

2. Additional audio outs or video outs- hook up a jack to your tv and probe around, you might find some cool snow or a strange extra audio out.

3. got some extra guitar picks up lying around? i found old pick ups can be very easily integrated into many bendables and allow for extra expression using magnets and things over the pick up

4. hook up flashing lights? extra blinkies are super cool. try putting one in line with a resistor on the main out put- that can usually get it blinking.

5. got another bendable or oscillating thingy? make a switch that disconnects the power supply and connects the power feed to a jack- some times you can power the bendable off the incoming signal from something else (i've usually only found this to work on things that work well with a battery starve pot)

theres some ideas

[telstarmagikistferrari]

Thanks a lot everybody.. these are good pointers. stolenfat those are some awesome ideas!

edit: with the above-described keyboard, the toy came with a 'mic' in and I was able to play guitar thru the distortion segment, creating a really unique effect! sounded great.