Barbie Karaoke
If I were to form some sort of experimental noise army, this piece would be standard issue. It’s portable, versatile, and loud.
It has four different functions.
- adjustable speed tape player
- simple, amplified mixer
- lo-fi echo processor
- odd/pulsing/morphing/bleeping sound generator
All of these functions can be used together to achieve a variety of different sounds and effects.
The echo circuit was made to only process the mic signal, but with a little re-wiring, I was able to patch the tape output into the echo also. The echo circuit itself is very simply designed and cheaply built. Changing any of its parameters causes it to go “bonkers”. The pulsing/morphing/bleeping sounds come from the echo circuit at a very low pitch setting. Lots of dense, tonal noise can be created using just this feature.
Controls
The original controls and hardware are:
- two mic. inputs
- stereo aux. Input
- echo on/off switch
- mic./aux cross fader
- right/left balance
The added controls are:
- replaced mic. 1/8″ jacks with 1/4″ jacks
- input 1 and input 2 volume controls
- power switch
- tape speed control
- independent tape volume
- echo pitch coarse tune and fine tune
- echo fade momentary pushbutton and on/off switch. This effect causes the echo to become more distorted with every repetition.
- echo hold on/off switch and setting knob
- Three pulse/tone generating switches with adjustments. These adjustments vary the volume and speed of the pulses.