Sound Electronics

A few months ago... OK maybe about a year ago I started looking back at a hobby I had as a kid growing up - Electronics. Thanks to Dick Smith and his "Fun Way to Electronics" books I spent many available hours working on small electronic projects.... some of which included small stereo amps and even a beer powered radio!!! Fast forward a couple of decades and I have had the urge to try my hand at electronics once again. This time however, I am wanting to be a bit more ambitious and build projects which I will use for my sound design work/ music experimentations. My initial goal was to build a x0xb0x TB-303 clone synth. With a waiting list of a couple of years to buy this in kit form, I decided to source the parts myself in order to start the build whilst I still have the bug. After my initial purchase of parts which I could source within Australia I soon realised that I needed to source some rare (and expensive) parts from OS. In hindsight I should have bit the bullet and forked out the cash late last year when I first decided to go down this route... as now the Aussie dollar is so bad, that my project has already gone up 35% in costs!!! With this in mind I have decided to "slowly" acquire these rare parts should I find them at a bargain price on Ebay or the like.
With no set date to start the x0xb0x I decided to continue my quest into electronics by starting some circuit bending projects. After a scrounge around the local tip's 2nd hand section I found myself spending a total of $5 on a drum machine, a "Tickle me Elmo" and 2 x kids keyboards - enough to start tinkering with. Firstly I started on one of the keyboards. Although successful, I wasn't completely satisfied. What I wanted was a Texas Instruments "Speak and Spell". After several months of placing free classifieds I finally sourced a Speak and Read a couple of weeks ago! Although not being the Speak and Spell, it is just as good. So after a couple of weeks of wiring and testing, here are some photos of my new toy - albeit with some brain surgery! Sound files to follow soon...