Extra drowsy Formula

Okay, so a cassette player makes noise when its tape head reads information off of a magnetic tape, right? And credit cards have those magnetic stripes on the back with their own information on them, right? So you should be able to play a credit card just like a cassette tape.

Turns out you can. It sounds a little bit like scratching a record. Here is a sample.

Here’s how to make your own credit card noisemaker.

Stuff You Need:

• Credit card. Or, really, anything with a magnetic stripe: Hotel key card, MetroCard, Costco card. They all seem to make pretty much the same noise.
• Speaker. A guitar amp is fine. Small is great; I’m using this little amp from Radio Shack.
• Alligator clips.

You’ll want two pairs (each pair is connected by an insulated wire, like the one above).

• Phone plug.

This one is a mini — you can use a 1/4″ instead if you’re running it into a guitar amp. Mono is fine (and a little cheaper). Get one where you can get at the connectors (on the left of the pic). You’ll be connecting one alligator clip to the short one (top left) and the other alligator clip to the longer one.

• Tape Head.

You can pull this out of any old tape deck that isn’t working anymore. This one is mono, which means that there are only two (instead of four) connections in the back, so there’s less futzing around — but stereo is fine too. I pulled this one out of a little kid’s plastic walkman that I picked up at Value Village. (Broken answering machines are good too.) Note that I kept the wires attached to it; this makes it a little easier to hook things up to it.

Now, all you have to do is use the alligator clips to attach the two connectors of the plug to two connectors of the tape head. (It doesn’t seem to matter what gets hooked up to what when you’re using a mono head and a mono plug. With stereo stuff, you may have to do a little trial and error.) Then, plug the plug into your amp.

Now rub the tape head against the magnetic strip on the back of the card. Sweet music!

(The obvious next step is to take a cassette tape and take out the actual tape part, and use some sort of adhesive to affix it to a flat surface, and then play it with a loose tape head, like a really low-rent Laurie Anderson.)

Buying stuff on eBay is dodgy. Here’s a phonoharp I bought recently.

It’s a precursor to the autoharp. The metal grill across the middle has holes in it, in three horizontal rows; when you scrape a pick along a row, it hits only the strings exposed by the holes, thus sounding a chord. There are only three chords possible, but C, G, and F are pretty much the only chords I use anyway.

This particular one has a patent date of 1891 stamped on it; I am not sure how old this particular one is. It has a solid body — rather than a hollow one with a soundhole — which I’m guessing dates it fairly early.

The problem with this one is that the dead pin end is starting to pull up due to the tension of the strings.

Here is a side view of (what in the photo above is) the lower left-hand corner:

You can see a pin sticking out at the far right; this is what the strings hook onto.  (There’s a whole row of them, one per string.) As the string is tightened (using the standard zither pins at the top end), the loose wood will pull upward. This means that it’s not possible to keep the thing in tune, since the pulling will cause the strings to loosen; tightening them will only cause the wood to pull up further until it comes loose entirely and smacks you in the face.

Now, if this was something I could look at before buying, it’d be one of the first things I’d check. It’s way too much hassle to deal with that sort of bodywork. This one might be easier, being a solidbody. Can I just shove some woodglue in there and clamp it down for a few days? Should I run a screw into it?

I think what I will do is run it by an instrument repair shop and see what they think. Worst comes to worst, it cost me less than $20 (including shipping) and I can live without it, but it’d be nice to get it up and running.

Further reports as events warrant.

Today I finished up my Optical Theremin project.

It makes a squealing, screeching sound. The two diodes on the right detect light; as the light grows more intense, the pitch of the squealing sound goes up. You can play it by waving it around, by waving a light in front of it, by waving your hand in between it and a light, or any combination of the three. It is not particularly musical.

The switch on the bottom is an on/off switch; the nub next to it is an output jack, allowing you to plug it into an amplifier or directly into a recording device. (It has no internal speaker, so it makes no noise unless it’s plugged into something.)

Here’s what it looks like on the inside:

I used the plans on this page, with a couple of very minor modifications — for instance, I’m using a 9v battery instead of AAs so that it’ll all fit in the box, and I added the on/off switch. I’m thinking that I might add an LED (maybe to the left side) that shows when it’s turned on (since it makes no noise by itself).

The bottom of the inside of the box is coated in Plasti-Dip, as detailed here. Both the battery and the circuit board are stuck to the bottom with some double-sided scotch tape.

I am just starting out with this stuff — learning how to solder and all that. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here and I’ll answer it the best I can.

Here’s a photo essay detailing how I attached a strap to my autoharp.

I’ve seen several sources recommending that the strap knobs be placed in the lower right corner and in the middle high side, as shown in this pic:

(more…)

Today I got some Plasti Dip liquid rubber and poured it into a couple of Altoids tins, coating the inside bottoms to prepare them for installations of little photo-theremins.  (Update: see here for the finished project.)

(The rubber is to stop the flow of electricity, so that the circuit board won’t connect to where it’s not supposed to.) I’ve collected a few different tins, so maybe I’ll make a few and sell ‘em for a couple of bucks — I’m keeping the Heat Miser tin for myself, though.

Now, of course, I’m looking all around the house for more stuff to Plasti Dip. It’s fun! It’s also, of course, totally super-toxic, and I think using it gave me a headache. Boy, they’re not kidding about using it in a well-ventilated room — I was on the patio, even.

I also took apart my Boss DR-202 to see if I could figure out what was wrong with the AC jack; the power cuts in and out. I was hoping it was something simple that I could look at and say, “oh, the solder’s gone and fallen off” — no such luck. So it’s batteries for now.

I often complain that I never get any of the real good scores, like those people that pull Hammond B3s out of dumpsters or find Moogs at flea markets. As it turns out, though, checking Craigslist two or three times a day can pay off: yesterday I picked up a Korg Poly-800, plus, as an added bonus, an Alesis NanoSynth — $35 for both! Luckily, I contacted the seller almost immediately after they posted the ad — they probably could have asked 7 or 8 times as much and still sold it, so there must have been lots of other people inquiring about it after I did.

Here is a picture of the Poly-800:

This picture is from the “quick-start” sheet that came with it. The guy is Chuck Leavell, who is promoted here as “On Record and Tour With the Rolling Stones.”

He looks like a really nice guy and the photo is of course awesome, but part of me feels like this represents some sort of turning point for the Stones in some way that they could never recover from. Is it the shirt?

The keyboard itself had all of its factory preset voices erased — the only sounds it made were weird helicopter and static sounds. Since the previous user was a lady in her eighties (the [late, I assume] mother of the person selling it), I have to wonder what exactly she was concocting. I’d like to think she was just into making crazy-ass noise. (This idea is bolstered by the presence of the NanoSynth, a little thing with a few knobs that makes the keyboard — in the words of the person selling it — “sound weird.”)

Anyway, it originally came with a cassette tape (!) with the factory presets on it — you would plug it into the keyboard and it would make those fax noises and the keyboard would figure it out. This cassette was not included, but a little Googling turned up a .wav file and now everything is factory-new. Cool.

Just a quick note — I added another dozen or so instruments to the gallery. Now I just have to finish up some of the songs in the pipeline that actually use this stuff…

I’d like to update some of the big pics (what you see when you click on the little ones) at some point with pics of me playing the instruments, since some of them are pretty obscure. And it would be cool to have little sound files, too — just quick little snippets of the instrument solo.