trikome: .com

This little beast of a keyboard is so lofi it’s ridiculous.. it’s a rompler which must have like 4 bit audio samples stored on it, and the notes are transposed so the C key plays an A note. It’s so bad, it’s good! Kinda like the paint job lol.. bright ass pink with yellow and teal buttons … but it actually makes some pretty dirty sounds, especially the drum samples.

Mods include
2 distortion buttons
4 “glitch” switches/buttons
fine and coarse pitch knobs
IR sensor (not demonstrated in this video, but when enabled, pitch responds to IR sources like light bulbs or TV remote controls.. remotes actually make cool LFOs )
3 body contacts
1/4″ mono output

For the holidays i made a video of the keyboard playing one of the built in songs, Jingle Bells (aka “song 3″). Enjoy

I’ve been noodling around with circuit bending recently. It’s pretty fun turning toys into noise-making monstrosities, but you don’t always have the fine control you want, and sometimes it’s just fun to make things from scratch.

I started reading about 555 timers which can be used to generate tones, LFOs, or really run anything that needs a clock. I’m planning on building some step sequencers to add to some of my music toys, but for now, here is my first analog synth. It’s made from just a few parts which cost only dollar or two. It generates a nasty squarewave, but it’s fun lol. I need to figure out how to get other waveforms. Right now I can only modify the duty cycle, and it seems in some “modes” the duty cycle changes with the frequency. I think I can rewire it to be stable, but I’m just learning.

Anyways, here’s a few pics and some audio.
Audio: trikomes-1st-synth.mp3