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One of the more versatile of my bent toy creations is this "Phonics Keyboard." The base toy has this set of 5 buttons along the bottom of the touch pad area-- the left-most one (green) is a power on/off button, but the rest activate various different 'modes': Some play voice clips saying letter names/sounds, some spell out a word tied to the letter, and some cause each of the touch pad buttons to play a little musical tune. Notably, however, each 'mode' is also tied to a different instrument sound for the little keyboard along the bottom: one mode makes the keyboard sound like a piano, another makes it sound like a violin, etc. As for my mods: -A 1/4" audio output jack -A toggle switch to toggle between routing audio to the output jack or the toy's built-in speaker -Two body contact points that when bridged (both touched) causes the clock speed to pitch bend up / higher (the more skin contact, the higher the pitch) -Two clock speed "pitch" control knobs: One course and one fine. (Starts at the 'base' speed/pitch and goes down from there) -One big red arcade-style button that activates a stuttery glitch. (More on that below...) The smaller (course) knob can be pressed in to act as a toggle switch to activate/deactivate all pitch bending from either knob as well (as an easy way to restore the 'true' pitch of the original toy.) I often will tap the body contact points rapidly to create little 'fluttering' warbles in the pitch, which can be done while the other knobs are otherwise pitching the toy's clock speed way down. As for the stutter glitch button-- it seems to be tied to the the functionality of the "U" button on the touchpad, as it triggers the same samples for that relative to the 'mode' you're in, but with one strange alteration: it 'stutters' first before playing-- like you're actually triggering the button multiple times in a row in rapid succession even though you're only hitting the button once. On one of the modes it sort of 'hiccups' with a glitch-y sound first instead of just a straight-up stutter. I ended up recording a lot of audio from this thing, given all it can do. First up-- just a recording of the base instrument sounds (no pitch bending) you can play on the built in keyboard using the different 'modes' as an instrument selector:

Of course, you can use any of the clock speed mod options on those to do all sorts of weird pitch bends on them:

Here's me pressing the various touch screen buttons to trigger some of the educational phonics voice clips and pitch-bending those:

And lastly, some examples of the stutter glitch button in the different modes as well:

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I often go looking through thrift stores and antique shops looking for unusual boxes to act as cases for some of my instrument projects and at one I found a strange wooden box that someone had carved "JANET" into the lid. The possibility of making some instrument named Janet seemed entertaining to me, so I bought it. (Inside, there were more carvings: "A.D.P -Hostess Snowball Queen" This was followed by a smiley face also carved into the inside of the lid, and the "A.D.P." had quotation marks carved around it.) But what would be sufficiently worthy to be named Janet? Eventually I found the perfect subject: while playing around with a spy-gadget themed voice changer toy I stumbled into a bend that caused it to feedback on itself and create these really interesting ripples of sound, and some stuff to further modify that, like some gnarly distortion.) So I mounted the guts of the spy gadget toy into the wooden box and Janet was born. On the back there's two 1/4" audio jacks-- an input (what was the microphone of the original toy) and an output (what was the speaker) The knob on the left is basically how much of the 'voice changer' effect is dialed in, and the knob on the right is basically a volume knob for the input so you can dial in the intensity of either the actual input (if you have one) or the feedback if just using the feedback loop. The switch on the left above the "JANET" is sort of an overall on/off switch, and the switch to the right toggles on/off the feedback loop. Various body contact points let you modify the sound a bit more in ways that are hard to describe and I don't fully remember... like adding some buzzy distortion-like effects or causing the loop to 'reset' a bit to shake up the rippling pattern sound of the loop. One of these is in the form of a sort of switch mechanism where you can push a metal spring bar down to connect it to another metal contact. (I'll be totally honestly I don't remember at this point which metal contact bits do what anymore...) One last quirk of the design of Janet is there's a little hole in between the two knobs-- this is where I initially attempted to mount one of the switches, but the switch completely broke apart and the threading is still stuck there. I considered maybe mounting an optical sensor under the hole to give it a point, but ultimately decided against it (I don't like the unpredictability of those) so it's now just a weird little mystery hole and I feel like that's perfect for the little weirdo that is Janet. Anyway time for some audio clip demonstrations! This first audio clip just shows the voice changer effect on an input sound (A voice saying the letter "W" from a different toy I plugged in) As I turn up the left (effect) knob, it makes the sound higher pitched and more distorted. (You'll also note there's a sort of steady passive background tone always on with Janet for some reason...)

But this next clip is much more interesting, showing off what really makes Janet shine-- the feedback loop. Later on in the clip I also start using the various body contact points to show some of the effects that can have. WARNING: it gets pretty loud and noisy af near the end!

So yeah-- she's capable of making some hypnotizing synthy rippling to some absolutely filthy noisy drones. After building Janet I showed it to a sound designer I knew and let him play around with it, and upon discovering some of the noisier sounds, said "Oh my... Janet, you're a dirty girl." That seems like as good of a way as any to wrap up this post on probably my favorite still-surviving circuit-bent toy creation.

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One of my favorite bent toy creations, just for the fun of playing it due to the fun form-factor... This is a toy guitar with a fretboard full of keys to play individual notes like a keyboard. The toy also has 3 buttons for playing stock melody jingles of classic children's tunes as well. My mods include: -A course pitch adjustment (clock speed) knob -A fine-tune pitch adjustment knob in the form of a whammy bar stolen from a Guitar Hero guitar. -A volume adjustment knob (on the bottom, next to the output jack) -A small toggle switch for activating this crunchy ring-mod like distortion effect I found as a bend. -A 1/4" audio output jack -A toggle switch for routing the audio to either the toy's internal speaker or the output jack There's 3 brass tacks pushed in that were originally intended as body contact points as well but they don't seem to work-- not sure if they're just broken now or if I never ended up wiring them up in the first place. Either way I thought they still looked cool as a decorative element so hey. The fretboard keyboard and whammy bar help to make this one super fun to play-- you can really rock out! One of my favorite bent toy creations, just for the fun of playing it due to the fun form-factor... This is a toy guitar with a fretboard full of keys to play individual notes like a keyboard. The toy also has 3 buttons for playing stock melody jingles of classic children's tunes as well. My mods include: -A course pitch adjustment (clock speed) knob -A fine-tune pitch adjustment knob in the form of a whammy bar stolen from a Guitar Hero guitar. -A volume adjustment knob (on the bottom, next to the output jack) -A small toggle switch for activating this crunchy ring-mod like distortion effect I found as a bend. -A 1/4" audio output jack -A toggle switch for routing the audio to either the toy's internal speaker or the output jack [Located on the back, so not seen here] There's 3 brass tacks pushed in that were originally intended as body contact points as well but they don't seem to work-- not sure if they're just broken now or if I never ended up wiring them up in the first place. Either way I thought they still looked cool as a decorative element so hey. The fretboard keyboard and whammy bar help to make this one super fun to play-- you can really rock out! The hole I cut out for the whammy bar is a bit uglier than I'd like but the fun-factor of the whammy bar is so fun it makes up for it. One last note: the bottom-most key on the fretboard doesn't work, due to the way the audio routing toggle switch got installed-- the button can't be pressed down far enough to trigger the sound. Anyway, here's some example audio of me playing around with it:

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I had found this weird old telegraph at an antique shop and figured it'd be fun to mess with. Originally the top end had (where the knob is now) a socket for a tiny light bulb to plug in, so you could make it blink out patterns of light. I don't think any of it still worked anymore when I got it. In any case, I removed the original old circuit board and put in a new one that was either from a DIY kit for some beepy tone generator or maybe just cannibalized from some device that made a beep sound-- I actually don't remember anymore. The telegraph's clicker mechanism was wired up to let people tap out patterns of the beeping, and then I added two pitch control knobs-- the one on the top middle is the course pitch setting and the one on the side is the fine tuning knob (and also doubles as an off switch if you turn it all the way down.) This one admittedly has some quirks-- namely: 1.) that the tone is on by default and you press the telegraph to mute it rather than the other way around (tap to mute vs tap to beep) 2.) The audio output jack (1/8th" jack) seems to only work if the plug isn't inserted all the way... (Maybe I wired it up backwards so that the tip of the plug needs to be touching the part that normal the shaft of the plug touches instead?) and 3.) The amount the fine-tune knob effects the pitch is highly dependent on (and proportional to) the the course pitch setting. At lower course pitch settings the fine tune knob might not make any audible difference at all, at middle ranges it can sort of pitch up and down a bit like a bend wheel, and at the highest course pitch the fine tune knob has quite a wide range. So usually I just leave it at the highest pitch course setting and then turn the fine-tuning knob while tapping out rhythms to get some squeaky beepy beats. Underneath the core telegraph clicker thing there's this metal hinge piece that can rotate around and 3 little metal contact points under that, letting you turn the hinge and push it down onto one of the metal contact points. I've wired up those to add a bit of hum when they're connected (and it seems to pick up the actual click of the telegraph arm a tiny bit as well?) Each of the 3 contacts is technically wired up to a different spot on the circuit but the hum/effect produced sounds basically the same for each. While the two metal bolts look like they might be body contact points... nope, they're not-- they're helping to hold the circuit board in place. There's also that weird metal clip on the right and that also has no function (part of the original device-- not sure what it was for...) Here's me tapping out some beats at various pitch settings with some knob fine-tuning for variance, followed by showing the full range it can go down, and near the end of the clip showing with the added hum from the contact point hinge thing.

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I found this "Interactive Solar System" toy at a Goodwill store I think? The base toy gives facts about our solar system said in these crunchy samples of this intense and vaguely British-sounding voice... So it's a lot of fun on it's own just for that. As far as mods go it's got a knob for the usual clock-speed pitch control, along with a 3 position switch (middle is off, right is to make the knob go super deep low and weird, and the left is to make it go higher...) Similarly there's 3 body contact points-- the giant metal handle at the top is the core touch point, and while touching that you can then touch one of the two metal bolts on the right to pitch up or down respectively. There's also a 1/4" audio output jack and a 2-position toggle switch (the one at the top) to toggle between routing the audio to the toy's speaker or the audio output jack. I tried to grab a recording of me playing with actually pitch bending it, but the line out sounded... off (like it wasn't grabbing most of the frequency bands) so I may need to investigate why that is... (It sounds fine if you just use the speaker though) But at least in the meantime here's a recording from earlier where I just recorded some of the voice lines from the toy about Mars:

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This is one of my oldest still-surviving bent toys, although it's seen better days... it's a little toy cell phone that I called the Phreak-O-Phone. One of it's most unusual features is that it has a permanent 1/8" audio-out cable (repurposed from an old set of headphones) instead of an audio-out jack. This was if I recall more due to it being what I had readily at hand, although may have been due to a lack of good spots to put an audio out-jack. The toy's original speaker was also removed to put in the pitch knob so you must use the cable and plug it into something to hear it. That said, the toy naturally plays a bunch of cute sfx-- each number button plays a woman's voice saying the number, one button plays a clip of old dial-up internet sfx, some play telephone ringing sounds and phone-related voice clips ("Hello!") and some of the other buttons play little musical jingles. Beyond the unusual audio-output situation the other mods are all just pretty standard clock speed pitch bends in the form of the knob and the body contact points. By this point I think the knob no longer actually works, but the body contact points cover the same ground so you can still get some gnarly sounds out of this thing. :) Here's a recording of me playing around with the various samples and jingles before bending the pitch for some weird stuff :)

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I’m back after a long hiatus to post a bunch of the other circuit bent toy instruments I made!

This is a pretty simple bend on a toy keyboard I found. For the most part it’s just a standard clock speed pitch bend… but this one has one twist: the speed is connected to the blinking lights on the keys (the keys light up for teaching purposes and fun light show patterns on the demo songs) so when the lights flicker on and off it modulates the pitch in interesting ways.

You can either just press keys and pitch bend, or my personal favorite— just activating one of the sample drum beats or songs and let it modulate itself into interesting glitchy patterns.

Because of its kind of cyclical modulation it reminded me of old sci-fi film Sfx so I call this thing the UFA as a play on UFO… but short for Unidentified F-in’ Awesome! ;) Specific mods include: -the pitch/speed knob -Two body contact points for further pitch modulation -A 1/4" audio output jack -A toggle switch to route the audio to the speakers or the output jack

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So in my last post I showed off my latest circuit-bent gadget "The Akira Detonator" Here's a sample of it in action. First on the recording there's me jamming out with the clock speed jacked up high so all the samples squeak adorably, then I shift it into low clock speed mode for some lower pitch growling and play with that for a bit, and then the second half is the feedback tone with some pitch bending. I'd like to stress that 1.) This was all in one take and I'm just kinda improvising-- it's just for the purposes of showing off what this thing is capable of, not a legit piece of music or anything  and 2.) I did boost the volume of the feedback tone part, since I did warn in the previous post that it's rather quiet on it's own... Enjoy!

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New Instrument:  The Akira Detonator! It's been a long time since I've updated this blog. This is not because I haven't been building new crazy creations-- I've just been neglecting to document and post about them. So I'll have to come back later and post about some of the stuff I've worked on in the meantime. In any case, this thing is something I just built, and I felt like it was too awesome not to post about it. While so far none of the instruments I've posted about here were circuit-bent toys... I AM an avid circuit-bender and so I make a lot of those. This is my latest bent toy. Specifically, it's a circuit-bent Navystar Spelling Board. I have named it (at least for now) The Akira Detonator -- a reference to an obscure noisecore band (Akira Detonate- and it seems like there is almost no info on them on Google...?) In any case, the name sounded appropriately badass (to compliment my sweet paint-job I gave this thing), it certainly makes a lot of crazy noises, and the initial way I enjoyed "playing" this thing was jacking the clock speed way up and playing it's alphabet sounds at such high speeds they become incomprehensible shrieks... The resulting sound kinda reminded me of Anime characters fighting or something, So the Akira reference seemed to fit decently well too. :)

Anyway, my mods: Already mentioned is the clock speed control for pitch control-- a standard on just about every circuit-bent toy. The big silver knob controls that, and the switch mounted right above it is a 3-position switch:

Center is off (No clock speed control-- i.e. the toy's original clock speed)

Left makes the clock speed/pitch lower and lower as you turn the knob.

Right makes the clock speed/pitch get higher as you turn the knob.

As you can see from my pic of the back of the box, there were originally these cards that you'd put into the toy, and if you look closely  you'll see they had a system of notches along one side. These notches opened or closed a series of switches on the inside of the device, so the machine knew which card was inserted and could respond accordingly. Since I didn't want to use the cards, I had to improvise a new solution. I mounted a row of 4 tiny switches along the left side of the machine instead so the user can set which 'card' (mode) they're in without using the cards. This was a necessity as all 4 switches being open (the equivalent of no card inserted) does nothing. (Or, rather, it just makes the same warning beep for all input.) Then of course I installed an audio-output jack so this toy can be easily recorded and sampled. Since space was really limited on the inside of this toy, I had to use the area the speaker would normally go to house the clock-speed control pot, so I completely removed the original internal speaker-- making the addition of an audio-out jack all the more important. Lastly there's the switch on the right side. This switch produces a feedback with the audio, resulting in a consistent buzzing tone, the pitch of which is controllable with the clock-speed controls. This means rather than playing the toy's samples via the buttons, you can flip this switch and "play" the buzzing drone sound instead. There is a bit of a catch though in that 1.) This tone is much quieter than the samples, so you have to crank your amp up a bit to make it a good volume level for an instrument and 2.) Without playing the samples via the buttons eventually the toy times-out and turns off, saying "Goodbye!" as it does so. This is a problem when you've cranked the amp way up. :P Fortunately, since the time-out is controlled by, hey, the clock-speed, if you're playing in low-pitch mode you can play for a looooong time before this happens. :) I'd also like to call out my one in-progress picture. The reason that one was taken was so that I could open it up in Photoshop and plan out the color scheme I wanted to paint the toy, once I had decided to give it a new paint job. I don't know if I've ever repainted a circuit-bent toy before (usually I like the charm of the original designs of the toys) but this one was kinda bland (all yellow) and given how good it was sounding and how fun it was to play compared to a lot of my other bent toys, I felt it was worthy of a new paint job. So, the repainting was a big experiment and I'd say it was a good success-- It looks awesome! :) (As a perk, my landlord saw me spray painting the case pieces out back, and so after talking about my instrument building hobbies she said she'd give me any crazy electronic items old tenants leave behind when they move out-- which apparently happens a lot. So... score! Possible new gadgets to mod into future instruments for this blog... :D) EDIT: You can now hear it in action here.

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Here's a song I made to demonstrate the drumitar, my first attempt at building a stringed instrument. Note that I'm not nearly so coordinated to actually play my own instrument this well... instead I recorded individual string note sounds (some with the natural pitch bends created by applying pressure to strings opposite the bridge, and some without any bending) then assembled these basic sound samples into some cool little melodies within my DAW. The drumitar sounds kick in around 40 seconds in. At 1:20 I'm playing the strings on the other side of the bridge for higher notes.

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I mentioned that the toy guitar I had used to make my tape-bow violin was just laying around because I had already cannibalized it's parts for another project? Well, this is that project.

I don't know what to call this thing. I've been calling it the Drumitar, but that sounds kind of dumb, so I'm looking for a better name for it. :) In any case, I liked the sound guitar strings make when struck percussively, but the design of a real guitar doesn't support that very well. So I thought it would be interesting to try to build something that let me do that more effectively.  Basically, my own DIY version of a hammer-dulcimer. (Well, sort of.) I had seen the little toy guitar for $10 in a shop near my office, but it wasn't until their going-out-of-business sale (everything half-off!) that tempted me to finally buy it, and decided that it would be the start of my drumitar project. I knew I needed something to spread the strings out wide so I could more easily strike strings without worrying about hitting the wrong string by accident. (This was NOT designed to be strummed, unlike a guitar.) I've been lately enamored with the idea of making very antique-looking instruments thanks to the awesome gadgets in the instrument collection of Emilie Simon... so I often look around in local antique shops for parts I can use for my instruments. I ended up finding this large vintage steam trunk in one of them, and bought it to form the 'case' for this thing. It had room for me to really space the strings out wide for easy playing. It also does make it officially the biggest instrument I've ever made. (The first one I could hypothetically fit inside, if the strings weren't in place!) Initially I used the strings harvested from the toy guitar, which, due to the design of the original toy, meant the strings were at very different lengths, and so I had to mount the tuning pegs in a horseshoe-like pattern. This first design failed terribly for several reasons:

The toy strings were cheap and terrible, and many of them broke on the process of stringing/tuning the instrument

I only learned after my initial set-up that in a real hammer dulcimer, the bridges are placed in a way provides different notes and octaves due to the tension on the bridge vs the length of string on either side of it. In other words, you're meant to hit the strings on BOTH sides of the bridge, because that gives you more notes. With the horseshoe configuration the closest pegs didn't provide enough striking surface, and were too high tension to work well when struck.

Also, closing the trunk case was impossible due to the bridge -- it needed to be cut-down/shaved away so the case could actually close.

So, knowing that I had to buy new (real) guitar strings and re-string the thing and mess with the bridge anyway, I overhauled the design a bit. Unfortunately, for some reason two of the tuning pegs are really loose and don't work right-- I think I may have drilled slightly too large of a hole for them, and so they are free to spin around a little more than they should? One of those is the biggest (deepest) string. Fighting with it to get it to work was proving too frustrating and impossible, so I eventually decided to remove it entirely. This is a 5 string instrument instead of a 6 string. Deal with it. ;) (It's not like this is a professional piece for a client anyway-- this was just my first awkward experiments with stringed instrument design...) The tuning peg for it is still there, but the string has been removed, since it was impossible to keep at a workable tension to be playable. The other wonky tuning peg, however, is a bit more necessary for making a proper scale of some kind... So I ended up improvising a terrible solution of jamming a small metal rod through the tuning peg, and I tune that one with a pair of pliers. It sucks, but at least that actually works. One interesting and unintended side effect of this instrument's design is that it's awesome for pitch-bending! Just hit a string and then apply pressure to the same string on the opposite side of the bridge and you get a really nice pitch bend. It's great for making this thing sound less like a guitar and more like some kind of neat ambiguously far-eastern instrument. Knowing that I was working with a stringed instrument for the first time, I was curious to try installing a guitar pickup, just to try it. Bought a spare pickup from a local guy who sells and repairs guitars and tried mounting that. Unfortunately, in the place that it made the most sense to mount the pickup, it must have just been too far away from the strings to pick up the vibrations as I could only hear it with  my amp cranked up to the max. Not really worth it. So I ended up removing the pickup (using that for a later project) and mounted a piezo element by just jamming it under the little mini-bridge where the strings originate from. The tension of the strings pins that smaller bridge down, and thus holds the piezo element in place as well, though it can still be easily be removed and reinstalled since it's not held in place by anything other than string tension. You'll note in my photos that everything is hooked up with alligator clips at the moment-- I haven't actually bothered to solder wires to any of the electrical bits yet. In any case, the piezo element is hooked up to a volume knob (since the piezo is very sensitive so otherwise this thing clips like crazy when recorded) and then to an output jack... both of which are mounted on one of the side of the trunk. Besides just actually wiring this up properly, another update I'd like to make to this instrument if I work on it more is to make the inside look more pretty. The outside case look so cool, that it's such a shame that on the inside there's that really tacky cheap-looking wood pattern to the inside walls. Looks ugly to me. I have this lovely red silky fabric with an interesting pattern to it... I'll have to see if I have enough left over to cover the inside walls with it. Don't know how I'd want to tackle prettyifying the wood panels I added though, since I REALLY don't want to have to re-string this thing again... :P You can hear how it sounds in the song I posted here!

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Here's a sample recording of the Battery Clip Kalimba shown in my previous post. First 1/3rd of the recording is just the individual sounds it makes -- me flicking each of the 5 battery clip springs to produce it's signature metallic twangs and buzzing. Second 1/3rd is me attempting to play some music on the thing. (I usually just sample sounds from my instruments and compose with those samples rather than play anything live, though...) Last 1/3rd is the neat sound produced when you rub your finger down the middle so it brushes past all the plastic ribs between the battery banks. :)

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Decided to do a quick post tonight, so here's one of my more simple instruments: The Battery Clip Kalimba. Lately I've been inspired to play around with some more acoustic sounds rather than electronic ones. After seeing a video where someone plucked out a mean beat on the battery clip springs of a gameboy, and realizing I have lots of extra battery clip springs scattered around my workshop, I decided to make this fun little gadget. Basically all I did was mounted a battery pack onto a project enclosure box, and mounted a piezo element to the bottom of the battery pack as a contact mic, and rigged THAT up to an audio output jack mounted in the enclosure. That's it, really. Just a battery pack mic-ed with a piezo element. :) You'll note that I added an extra battery clip spring from another gadget to give this thing another possible sound. Eventually I may add even more. Another fun thing to do with this little guy is brush your fingers across the plastic ribs in between the springs -- the sound that results is pretty neat! To hear this thing in action, look here.

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My Cheap DIY Tape-Bow Violin. Inspired by Laurie Anderson's tape-bow violin, but made on a budget of only about $10, just for fun over a Saturday evening. ;) Having acquired an old broken audio cassette player from a friend's yard sale, and realizing I had a violin bow handy, I decided to make a tape-bow violin out of it. The cassette player's drive belt was busted, but as I was ripping out the motor and gears and other mechanical bits anyway, that hardly mattered. The circuitry and tape head were still intact and in working order and that's all that counts! I had the wooden toy guitar body just lying around from when I ripped all the parts off of it to make another instrument (pics of that thing to follow soon...), and was looking for a good way to reuse it for something. Doesn't quite look like a violin, but eh, close enough. ;) I cut a large hole into it to make more room for the cassette player parts I was jamming in there, and so I covered the hole back up with an old lid for a project enclosure that I had lying around as well. The tape head was designed to be mounted to the side of the tape player rather than on top of something, so I mounted these weird plastic things I had removed from another toy long ago to the top of the enclosure lid and screwed the tape head into that. I had to also bend back the little metal bits that normally help feed the tape over the tape head, since I figure the bow would get snagged by those. Not wanting to wreck my violin bow (and not entirely sure how to disassemble and re-string a violin bow anyway) I decided to just tape the strip of audio tape over the top of the bow's strings. Kinda ghetto, and makes it harder to play (since you can't see exactly where the tape is under the strings) but it works okay at least. This is more of a novelty and 'for fun' project, so I didn't really care how cheap and hack-y the implementation was. :)

I haven't tried recording this thing yet. Maybe I'll record something and put it up here later. In the meantime just know that it pretty much sounds like turntable scratching when you play it. (Currently the audio tape is from a recording of Indian flute playing, and the strip I have attached seems to be one continuous note.) Making such sounds with a violin bow looks a hell of a lot classier (and dorkier) than playing it on real turntables though. ;)

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And so it Begins

Friends have been asking me to make a blog to show off my crazy musical instrument projects for a while now. Finally making that happen! First up will be to post stuff about my latest batch of already completed (or nearly-completed...) instruments. But after that I'll try to post more in-progress stuff as it comes along. :)