5-Pound Synth

Combining genuine 1970s circuit-bent electronics with more recent commercial components, Warren Burt’s 5-Pound Synthesizer is a semi-controllable, semi-anarchic instrument producing a myriad of scratchy tones, bleepy drones, noisebands, radio interference, pulsing sounds – and should the calculator overload, who knows what else!

The instrument comprises a circuit bent transistor radio and pocket calculator connected to form a feedback loop. A Yamaha SU-10 hand-held sampler, here used as a real time ‘scratch’ device, and an Alesis AirFX, set here to add frequency modulation (FM) to any input sound.

The connector between the calculator and the radio occasionally, and always unpredictably, acts like a theremin-type aerial, so that hand movements around the instrument can potentially shape the noise.

The Yamaha SU-10 has a ribbon controller which can process external sounds. More often than not Burt dances his fingers over the ribbon to produce a non-linear break-up of the synth’s noise.

The Alesis AirFX device allows you to control an effect by moving your hand over it. For this frequency modulation effect, left to right movements control the FM speed, while forward and back movements control the FM depth. Moving one’s hand away from the unit allows the sound to pass through unmodified.

And the instrument’s name? A sterling 5 pounds was the cost of the original components when Burt first built the synthesizer in England in 1978 (the connecting adapters being the most expensive bits…)