Circuit Bent Speak & and Read

Modified -by fastmatt real sound from the texas instruments chip analog generated speech synthesis
so no sampels!

fastmatt is  a professional circuit bender specializing in the classic Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, Read, and Math devices.

My main focus is on providing a quality product that my customers will be proud to perform and record with. Please have a look at my items.

unic sound lot or deep / glitch / drone /
minimal micro sounds.

You are looking at a carefully modified Circuit Bent Speak & Math, ready for you to glitch and tweak at your next gig or in your studio. My approach is to provide a simple and intuitive control layout designed to give you the best bends with a clean and balanced look.



I have modified this device as follows:

•HAND-E-GLOW - dual ultra-bright blue LEDs illuminate your hands as you play. The LEDs fluctuate as the volume of sound changes. Adds a very cool visual effect in semi-dark places

[ RIGHT SIDE ]
•Main power toggle switch - Lets you completely disconnect the battery power to make sure it doesn't drain when not in use, or worse, wake you up in the middle of the night.

•Two-way loop switch - Flipping this switch UP will freeze whatever sound is being made. Flipping it DOWN will LOOP a short piece of the sound over and over rhythmically. Use the momentary release buttons to grab the next random loop sound. Using the loops in conjunction with the glitch, and working the resulting sound with the pitch bend mechanisms, provides the most interesting possibilities.

•Momentary loop release buttons - Once you have the toggle loop switch engaged, use these to briefly release the loop in order to advance incrementally to find other freakish noises and tones. Many freeze points end up providing amazing melodic tones and even techno rhythms! Once you find a cool one, you can work it with the pitch bends.

•Tone buttons - These three momentary buttons can be used to play differently pitched tones. The ones on the side create a nice square-wave sound in low and high pitch. The one on the front makes a real loud sawtooth sound. All tones can be affected by the pitch knob and body contacts at any time, along with speech, glitch or loop sounds! You can pretty much play a song with some practice. Using them along with the body contacts gives you a sound much like an electric guitar with whammy bar.

[ LEFT SIDE ]
•Momentary distortion button - Unleash the evil voices! This gives the spoken voice sound a demonic, distorted overtone, and can add strange harmonics during a loop freeze.

•Toggle glitch switch - To get the machine into a raving glitch fit, flip this switch and hit the 'ON' button followed by various other keyboard buttons. With a little persuasion, this thing will jabber nonsense interspersed with tones and whole words. This switch is ON in up position, and OFF in down position.

•Pitch bend knob - This is one of my favorite mods. This will adjust the pitch of all sound (voices and noise) from very low to very high. You can almost play a tune with this when freezing loops. I have used a trimmer to precisely tune the low range for maximum lowness without crashing.

•Pitch Bend Body Contacts - On the same circuit with the knob, these two contacts give you an organic control over the pitch. Your skin becomes a living variable resistor used to control the system's clock speed. The voltage and current are harmless. Touching the left contact drops the pitch, and touching both at once drops it even lower. Use various combinations of pressure on the contacts to elicit notes or theremin-like sounds! Using this in combination with the lowest pitch knob setting will drop the clock to his lowest extreme limit of hopeless guttural doom! Another interesting effect with this bend is that pressing firmly on both, while holding down the ON keypad button, gives you a hard-core stream of crashing, glitching madness, with static-like sound and frantic, random characters on the display. The TI engineers would not approve! Also, touching the contacts while touching the 1/8 inch output jack gives you a rapid, frantic glitch. Go too far on this one and you may need to flip the power switch for a hard reset!

•1/4 in. Amplifier Output - This is essential for plugging into an amp. The jack circuit is attenuated with the proper resistor values so that the sound comes out clean and clear from your amp. This thing sounds great through an effects or delay pedal! (Check out my sound sample) For recording to your computer via the sound card, use the built-in 1/8 in. line-level jack instead.

Your item may appear slightly different, as the original devices had slight cosmetic variation.