Hey friends, looking for some advice input on CV control and body contacts.
I am working on a circuit bent project, and have found a really interesting effect when I connect two points via a 10k pot. It gets even more interesting when I touch the pot itself. I am guessing that the extra, variable resistance of the body contact is making the difference.
I want to find a way to get that kind of effect without using a body contact. I suspect it is down to the natural modulation of skin contact as a varialbe resistor, so have tried a vactrol, but it doesn’t really give me what I want. I am wondering if CV control would be different (so I can send in different LFOs, waves, etc) - buuut I don’t really know where to begin with adding CV control. Any tips or thoughts would be welcome!
Vactrols tend to have pretty high resistance - it’s not uncommon for them to have 2-10MΩ when in darkness. Have you tried multiple LDRs in parallel to bring the resistance donwn to the 10K of your pot? Hook them up on the breadboard and see what happens.
Your body contact is probably picking up a lot of electrical hum and other noise. Is there a metal enclosure or some sort of ungrounded shielding you can connect the point to to make it pick up noise? Otherwise you could try connecting it to a length of unshielded wire (looped around the ceiling? or maybe just coiled inside the enclosure) to the item so it picks up as much noise as possible.
If you can’t get around using a body contact and it’s a handheld device, maybe put the contacts in some ergonomic position so you’re forced to touch them whenever you hold the object.
I’ll leave the rest of the thread to @Dud , the master of circuit bending
I’ve made this sort of thing on a Looper Sampler ISD1820, to have the FX of the body contact without touching it, that was worked for me, maybe that can help
