Ben Heck’s Atari junk keyboard, part 1

Time for Ben and Atari to make beautiful music together — almost. The team creates an instrument inspired by the sounds you’d hear on an Atari console, using a technique called circuit bending. This means Ben gets his digital flip-flops on and creates the digital circuits from scratch, combining it with an almost full-size piano keyboard and a lot of analysis using an oscilloscope. If you’re interested in how this might sound, Felix connects variable resistors (potentiometers) with the circuit and gives it a test run. Be sure to check out the next part to find out how the build comes along, and join the element14 Community to tell us about your music hacks.



