Musini Proto
Let me tell you these things are something else. Excellent quality music samples in real stereo, and on top of that it's a glitching beast. Fresh off my first couple of successful external osc. experiments I decided to give a Musini a second try. I had opened when of these up once before, and fried it within a half an hour, but Jeff told me through one of the benders groups that there were good bends to be had, so I gave it a go.
Thanks to Jeff's tips I found the random crashy points pretty quickly, and I thought it would make a large difference if I could add pitch control. The weird thing about Musini's is that they have not one, but two xtals inside. The first one I picked to replace was incorrect, so I tried that second one. That really didn't work either, so I started probing around the circuit with my osc's signal on a probe wire. I found c16 on the board would accept the osc's signal, and lower the pitch. I added a 2 inverter setup, one side for the pitch, and another side setup to loop. I poked around with the signal for the looping osc, and found a way to trigger the toy using the osc to keep the toy playing. Normally a Musini would sense vibrations from children dancing, and play music to it roughly in time. By adding the LFO I can control the speed that the music plays, and keep it playing while I'm trying to get it glitching.
The added bends on this are a pitch control knob, music timing rate knob, pitch raising push button, main power on/off, glitch button, and glitch button that will glitch it when quickly tapped, and reset the Musini when held down for about 1 second. I found that last bend to be particularly interesting. Instead of it completely resetting the Musini, this bend will cause it to go right back to what it was playing before you started it glitching. I've never seen this in any other "aleatoric" instrument before.
I named this one Proto because it's not perfect. The pitch knob only gets about an octave of sweep, and I have a few more of these, so I'm hoping to give it another go when I a better chip for making oscs. 
I've done another Musini since the Proto, and have found that you don't have to use an osc. to control the pitch from C16, it will change the pitch by connecting the point to a pot through other point on the board.
This is a picture of the Musini's main board. The Musini I used to do this was fried, so I can't give specfic bend point, only areas. The small chip is where I found all the random glitches, the small cap near it is the common point that I used. The highlighted area near the big chip is about where C16 is located for pitch control. I will post more specific bend point when I get another working Musini. Good Luck!
|
