Circuit Bent Casio Mt-240 with Transparent Front Panel

YouTube via Destroyifyer — April 02, 2010 — "This is a circuit bent Casio Mt-240 which will be up for auction on ebay until April 11th, 2010. You can hear some songs and sounds made with this thing at www.freewebtown.com/destroyifyer on the Mt-240 page."

via this auction
"This is a circuit bent Casio MT-240. The box on the top is made out of oak coated with clear enamel. The front panel is clear plexiglas, the back part is steel. The knobs are all hand-painted hardwood coated with clear enamel. The keyboard is balanced and kept stable by two oak "feet" on the back complete with rubber grips. It has a 64 point patch grid, 16 fully routable pots, and a 16 channel mixer split into 4 groups of 4 by 3 switches. Also, there is a mounted tuning knob on the left. On the right is a reset switch for when using battery power. The machine can also be powered by an adapter, and of course a “manual” reset is required with this option! The 16 pots are of various resistance, the top 8 being 50Ω (very low resistance suitable for quite a few of the connections and fine tuning), the third row is 1 200Ω, 1 400Ω, 1 2kΩ, 1 2.5kΩ, and on the fourth row is three 5k Ω, the last pot being a 100k Ω super fine-tune that you can spin 12 or 13 times… this pot is great for those unruly connections which require higher resistance… there are only a handful of points like that on the patch grid though, so the 5ks and the 100k should suffice. There are 16 switches connecting the 16 pots in sequence, the last switch routing the last to the first to make a loop.

As far as performance, below there is a few little songs I threw together. I will admit, I am not the most patient demonstrationist, the songs are just me “messing around”, but I tried to make a balanced blend of good, bad, and ugly. I may post some more on the sound sample page later on in the auction. There is also a video below, and the audio from the video is available from the sounds link below. If you have skill at navigating around the chaos of this circuit bent keyboard, you will find yourself able to make some very impressive keys, sequence sounds with the drums, and pretty much anything you could hope for out of a circuit bent Mt-240. The patches are also very repeatable for the most part… if you diligently record your patches on paper or whatnot, you can get the same sounds… different voices and even keys conceal different sounds and whatnot, as previously stated they are all repeatable. The more patient you are with this instrument, the better you can work your way around the labyrinth of the patch grid and make some very cool sounds. To ramble on a bit, you can get delay at various decay rates, and also completely separate sounds and delay for the left and right channels, which is illustrated in one of the songs below. Square, sine, ramp and sawtooth LFO mod sounds can be achieved, envelope style pitch bending can be achieved… to summarize, all sorts of cool stuff."