Low-Battery as Aesthetic Practice: Voltage Starving Audio Gear

Talking about voltage starving your audio equipment with Will Klingenmeier.


I sat down for a virtual chat with Will, who has been doing some interesting experiments voltage starving his Moog DFAM and Subharmonicon. Voltage starving is when you intentionally deprive a circuit or device of the full voltage it needs to function, simulating a “dying battery”. The sounds you get are probably not what the manufacturer intended, but definitely an aesthetic worth exploring as you look for new sounds.

In this wide-ranging discussion, we talk about circuit-bending, starving stompboxes, and whether or not this is a good idea with your expensive equipment.

0:00 Introduction
0:30 What is “voltage starving”?
1:08 Voltage starving & circuit-bending
1:54 Voltage starving Moog synths
3:46 How to do it
4:33 Is this dangerous to your equipment?
6:07 Thinking about guitar pedals
8:15 Closing thoughts

Check out more videos on Will’s Channel here.

More creative electronics videos here:

Karplus-Strong Synthesis in Pure Data Vanilla

Patching up a Karplus-Strong synth from scratch in Pure Data Vanilla from scratch.

Karplus-Strong synthesis is a digital synthesis technique that simulates the sound of plucked strings by using a feedback loop to model the behavior of a vibrating string. Developed by Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong, this method generates resonant waveforms by feeding back a short noise signal through a filtered delay line with feedback. In this video, we build a simple K-S synth from scratch in Pd, exploring what happens when we mess with the various parameters.

  • 0:00 Defining Karplus-Strong synthesis
  • 1:25 Noise “burst” to excite the string
  • 3:23 Adding the delay
  • 4:57 Setting up the feedback
  • 7:13 Controlling the rate of the delay
  • 10:21 Understanding the range of pitches
  • 12:06 Adding the low-pass filter
  • 13:21 Talking through the patch
  • 14:05 Adjusting the envelope of the noise (bowed sounds?)
  • 16:02 Closing / Next steps / Randomization

More Pd Tutorials here: