Elmo's World Phone

I could not resist when I saw it at; I had to bend this phone.

Circuit Bent Elmo's World Phone

This Elmo phone has a pitch control (yellow knob), a 1/8" audio  output jack, audio selector switch, distortion and loop/drone glitch.  The drone and distortion operate from the same toggle switch.  A three position switch ((ON)/OFF/ON) is used to select between the two glitches.  The Drone effect is activated with the momentary position as it only takes the slight signal to put Elmo in a crazy state.

Mattel did not leave much room for me to work with, so thanks to small components (potentiometers, switches etc) and a Dremel tool, I was able to outfit Elmo with these much needed effects!


Check out the video:

The pitch potentiometer completely replaces the pitch resistor on the circuit board.  There are several bend points that affect his pitch, but I saw no sense in repeating the same thing.  The distortion and drone effect mainly feed from the audio portion of the circuit but routed with some added capacitors and resistors of choice.

Circuit Bent Elmo

This Elmo turned out great.

This Elmo has had the following improvements:

• Pitch Control (Red Knob)
• Pitch Control Switch: ON/OFF(ON)

• 1/8" Audio Output Jack

• Audio Selector Switch (Internal Speaker/Audio Out) 
•  Power Starve (Blue Knob)

Vtech Alphabet Desk

Circuit Bent Vtech Alphabet Desk

Modified toy to generate some unique sounds and textures.  Outfitted with a 1/4" output jack, volume control, output signal LED (red), glitch switch and a dual NAND gate distortion/oscillator function.

I made use of some industrial limit switches to activate the glitches.  I found the lever offered a bit more control in how lightly the switches are activated; particularly with the switch at the top as this activates a loop once depressed and also alters the pitch and can mix up the sounds.  Also, this glitch offers some steady drones.  The switch on the right stutters and repeats the sounds/voices when activated at the same time as one of the Vtech buttons.

The NAND gate effect has its signal routed from two sources on the circuit board, one of them is the audio output signal.  This offers heavy distortion on the voices and sounds.

Demo Video: