Customer Reviews

Circuit-Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments (ExtremeTech)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a great beginning introduction to circuit bending. When I recieved it I was immediately ready to read it cover to cover. However, while the information regarding what parts to get, as detailed info on completing specific projects is great, I couldn't help being distracted by a good amount of slef indulgence from the author. I'm really interested in the technical aspects of bending, and how to be able to strike it out on my own once I learn a thing or two. This book enables you to do this. It reads as preachy at times, and I find the personal asides (long pasages about camping trips and windstorms blowing charred embers into a tent, talk of the hippie 60's, etc.) to be annoying. I was able to overlook them until about page 100, but they certainly get old quickly. From a more utilitarian standpoint, it is simply harder to find what you are looking for when wading through a sea of wacky quips.

Hippies and aliens aside, I would seriously reccomend this book to anyone who has no experience whatsoever in electronics. Ghazala teaches good soldering technique, and moves through explanations of electronic components at a slow pace. However, If you are interested in circuit bending and other DIY electronic music forms in a broader sense I would recommend the book "Handmade Electronic Music" by Nicolas Collins over this one, simply because it presents things more seroiusly, more concisely, and has useful historical asides (talk of John Cage, Nam June Paik) that are more interesting than Ghazala's personal tales.

I just started looking into circuit-bending about a month ago. I googled the term and thankfully found Reed's site. It was both inspiring and informative. This book reads the same way. Without speaking over the head of the reader, this book holds much information on the subject. It is full of tips, pictures and diagrams that will have you on your way to creating your own interesting instruments. Though circuit-bending deals with electronics in so many ways, he still covers the aspects of instrument design. This book has it all, so check it out.

I was a novice with no bending experience but plenty of interest. I purchased this book because it was about the only reference I could find on the subject. I had ascertained from poking around on the internet that Reed really was the Godfather of bending. It turns out that he is also an exceptional teacher/writer. This book starts at the very beginning: The history of bending, necessary tools, soldering techniques, etc. Someone with no electronics experience whatsoever will be able to follow every step. I never felt like any steps were missing from the process. Reed explains every detail clearly, concisely and often humorously without insulting the reader's intelligence. The book goes on to discuss bending about 15 specific instruments. This is a great way to get a start and prepare you for the real fun: bending your own instruments. The only complaint I have is that it would have been nice to have all important tools and parts specified with part numbers (Many are). This would allow the reader to more easily obtain the necessary parts. However, this info is available online if you search a little. Word of warning: The costs of the necessary tools to bend are not negligible. You will need a soldering station, a Dremel hobby drill and various switches and components. The costs add up. However, these are mostly fixed startup costs that become trivial over the course of a bending career.

This book is great for aspiring electronics hobbyists who know nothing about building their own electronic devices but would like to learn and have something more interesting to show for their efforts than some boring counter device with a seven segment LED display. There is plenty of instruction on selecting components and assembling circuits, but there is not much in the way of theory as to why you get the sound you do. In other words, if you are looking for the math or musical theory behind any of this, it is missing. I really wouldn't have been that bothered by all of the narrative side trips that the author took that other reviewers have already mentioned if only at the end of the day he had delivered the goods in relation to the theory. If you are a fan of the Evil Genius series of books, you will probably like this book too. The instructions are clear and correct, and you will have something that works if you follow directions. What is missing is the why. What would be nice would be a book that combines the how of this electronics book with the why of more theoretical books on the subject that are usually totally impractical. I am yet to find one. The most accessible books I've found on the mathematics behind music are the two volumes of Musimathics that came out just recently.

This is The One; the comprehensive guide to circuit bending I have been searching for since I was introduced to the art in 2003, (by a friend named Reid, oddly enough.) At the time there was nothing but a few scattered resources online. We bought an eighty dollar electrical engineering book because we were anxious to learn and advance what we were doing. If Circuit Bending: Build Your Own Alien Instruments were available then, we could have saved ourselves a lot of confusion, a lot of fried circuits (R.I.P. Lovechild 1,) and Eighty Dollars!

Whether you are just starting out, or have been bending for years, there are countless tips, techniques, and in depth explanations that make Reed Ghazala's book a priceless addition to your workshop (or bedroom.) Even with processes I have known for years, Ghazala boils them down, simplifies and perfects them. And the text never gets boring; there is a perfect combo of technical-layman-mumbo-jumbo-anecdotes-and-asides that keep you turning pages and wanting to know more about the instruments, the art, and the author. You can also see, hear, and read more at Ghazala's website or the book's companion website, (even if you don't have the book yet.)

There is no be all and end all in Circuit Bending (one of the beautiful things about it) but Ghazala's book is the way to begin one's mastery of the art, all coming from the master himself.

Being a collector of synthisisers, and any strange homemade instrument that I could get ahold of to add to the strange sounds I enjoy crafting, circuit bending was the next frontier that I wanted to conquer. This book really showed me how to get into this fun and exciting hobby. It starts off with a breif history and theory of strange and experimental sound as music that I found interesting and informative. After that, you learn about the tools and components of the hobby, followed by a nice, easy to follow tutorial on soldering. Then we get into the nitty gritty of the hobby, Taking an old electronic battery powered device and turning it into an alien sound machine.
This book was VERY easy to read and there are a lot of nice pictures to demonstrate varous items and techniques. It made even me, a total newbie to this hobby feel confident to tear open a circuit board and solder it into unrecognisability and as a matter of fact, I probably would never have know anything of what to do without reading this book.
Add to the fine pictoral examples and tutorials the Eighteen projects that include plans for bending Speak & Spells, and the famed Casio SK1 keyboard, and you have a real value here.
This book was fun and easy to read and I still use it as a reference when I'm tearing apart an electronic gadget for the purpose of creating wierd sounds.
I've read other books that deal with similar material, but for someone starting out in the hobby, this book is all you need and it's definitely where I would reccomend starting out if you're interested in getting into this fun hobby.

great book for beginning circuit benders. you can go to the publishers website for close ups of the circuit board diagrams which was helpful because the ones in the book are printed kind of small. if you want to get into circuit bending, this is the book for you. my casio sk1 is now able to produce sounds that i never thought it was capable of and the combinations are endless and very unpredictable, which is a good thing in circuit bending!

I hadn't heard of circuit bending until only recently, when an excited friend and fellow musician told me about the amazingly modified "speak and spells" capable of generating out of this world sounds. I was hooked on the idea of using these strange sounds in my musical compositions and began my quest to find out more about circuit bending. I found exactly what I was seeking in Reed Ghazala's book. It didn't matter that I had no previous experience working with electronics. Mr. Ghazala makes electronics so easy to understand, anyone can create these insane sounding instruments. Typically, instructional manuals are really boring, but I found this book to be a real page turner... so much in fact that I forgot about the outside world.
So if you want to expand your musical horizons and break into the world of electronic instrument design, BUY
THIS BOOK!!!

As a musician who has utilized several bent instruments on recording, and having natural curiosity about the bending process, I figured this book would be interesting, but it turned out to be a more enjoyable reading experience than I might have thought. The author conveys information in a manner that is easy for a beginner to assimilate, but also assumes that the reader has a reasonable degree of intelligence, which is nice. A good teacher should be a stepping stone between what his or her pupils need to know and what they will find out on their own down the road. It goes without saying that an instructor should instill in his instructees at least a spark of interest, which is hard to do if he isn't really that interested himself. He should teach people how to learn for themselves. A sense of humor never hurts either. Mr. Ghazala presents his material in a way that reveals his ongoing love for the process, his reasonably intelligent and semi-dry wit and his eagerness to continue the journey of exploration. And I really like his ideas on what actually makes up music itself, and the notion that music is all around us all the time in the ordinary (and also the extraordinary and even non-ordinary) sounds we hear. It's also cool to find out when and where it all began. Aside from that, the book contains lots of very useful information in a nicely laid out format. For example, soldering is the thing that keeps many people from bending, so it's good to have a very good chapter about that. The factoids are helpful too. While I don't have much time right now to do any bending myself, I would like to take on one of the simpler projects described in the book, and it's nice to know that the particular item I'll be working with has a fragile casing before I go jabbing a big drill into it. Not everyone would even think to mention things like that.
Even if I never find time to put this book to use, and I do hope that I will, I have enjoyed reading it very much. The writing style appeals to me personally, and I think that if Mr. Ghazala wrote a fiction novel (and for all I know he may have written several) I would probably read that too. I'd recommend this book to musicians, mad scientists, architects, artists, electronics types, tech nuts and anyone interested in just reading a good book.

If you are interested in circuit bending and would like to start bending your own instruments, this is the book for you. I bought Mr. Ghazala's book last June and started bending an old toy keyboard a couple of weeks later. I had never even touched a soldering iron until I read this book! All of the basics of bending and soldering are covered in great detail and diagrams are provided for the 15 projects included in the book. With the fundamentals you will learn in this book, you can go on to bend whatever you want to. Why not learn to bend from Reed Ghazala, the father of circuit bending?