Starjammer

What it does

Starjammer started life as a battery-powered Dream Dazzlers toy guitar — real, touch-responsive strings that play its riffs when you brush them, buttons that trigger notes and built-in tunes, and a whammy bar. All of that still works. What's new is everything wired in around it: this is a circuit-bent instrument, so the fun is in pushing the toy's little sound chip past what it was ever meant to do.

The voltage starve browns out the circuit on demand for dying-battery pitch drops, stutters, and glitchy lock-ups. The added echo — with its own depth and feedback controls — smears everything into repeats that you can push all the way into runaway self-oscillation. Brush the touch-responsive strings to fire off the riffs, ride the whammy bar to warble the pitch, and the bends chew all of it into glitch. And because the internal speaker is gone in favor of a proper line out, you can run all of it straight into an amp, a pedal chain, or your interface.

Demo

Demo filmed by Onion Madder on the actual unit.

Controls & play

Strings

Real, touch-responsive strings — brush them to play the guitar's built-in riffs.

Buttons

Trigger individual notes and the built-in tunes.

Whammy bar

Bends and warbles the pitch of whatever the toy is playing.

Voltage Starve

Chokes the supply voltage for dying-battery drops, stutters, and unstable, glitchy lock-ups.

Echo — Depth

Sets how much echo is mixed in and how far it spreads out.

Echo — Feedback

Number of repeats — from a slap-back tail up into infinite, self-oscillating runaway.

The bends