You’ve heard the Speak & Spell. You’ve heard circuit-bent Speak & Spell. But are you ready to open a Hellmouth of total destructive speech chaos based on combining those into a massively powerful groovebox?
Ready or not, it’s here in the form of the Australian-built Glitch&Drum 1 Touch, aka GND-1T. Despite that prominent “Speak & Glitch” logo on the front, this is really a new digital instrument that incorporates elements of circuit-bent Speak & Spell hardware together with a complete digital drum machine/groovebox. It combines in equal parts the chaos and unpredictability of circuit bending, the unique sound of Texas Instruments’ linear speech synthesis tech, and various other glitchy-complex sound sources and modulation options. This is like an Elektron box that grew out of an alternate universe where TI’s Speak & Spell took over all synthesis.
And… holy Texas Instruments, Batman:
It’s also really performance-driven in a way even some competing hardware is not – hands-on with tons of patch morphing and assignable encoders, plus conveniences like a USB host port. The compact touchscreen interface and encoder layout recalls nothing if not the 1010music line – but then it’s got metal touchpoints like a circuit-bent instrument. (Okay, so I could also describe this as “1010music if they lost their frakkin minds.” I expect they’ll love this – and all that chaos would pair nicely with something like the bluebox.)
The magic really happens when you see it in full use:
The creator says they built on years of circuit bend Speak & Spell hardware but emulated all of that on a digital chip. And then, instead of just packing that into an enclosure and calling it a day, they ran with the feature set:
- Synthesis: Formant, vowel, glottal, speech, rhythm, groove, circuit bent, glitch, and complex oscillator
- 150 real-time parameters
- MIDI USB host, MIDI 5-pin DIN (with user-defined THRU), and MIDI over USB
- MIDI clock sync with individual PPQN scale for tempo, drum, LFO rate, and loop length (clever!)
- Automation and randomization
- Drift, morph
- Expression matrix to assign mod wheel, velocity, breath control, aftertouch, and dedicated expression LFO (XPlfo, they call it)
- Audio rate modulation of amplitude, pitch, and speech filter via MFO
- Touch sensor, main rotary encoder, and MIDI note number are all assignable
- Rhythm generator, which they say “interacts with the synthesis engine” and “improvises drum grooves on the fly”
- 40 built-in drum kits
- External MIDI support (or use drum note triggers as modulation sources)
- Internal stereo overdrive, resonant post-filter, echo/looper
- 1000 preset storage
Put it all together, and this is a machine unlike anything I’ve ever seen. You may have to invent a new genre to play this:
It’s an expensive purchase at $86— wait. Stop. That’s Australian Dollars. Okay, make that AUD$869 a reasonable US$550 or so. That’s not bad once you dig into the depth of the expression, MIDI, and groove engines, and the fact that this is ultimately way more than just a bent Speak & Spell, even as it appears to fully utilize all the robotic goodness of the TI speech engine. They also thoughtfully include a hard case for a little bit more.
Richard van Hoesel is the source of this madness, evidently. Here’s last year’s version, which was significantly simpler but gives a sense of the concept’s foundations and how it grew:
More info and purchase info:
https://richardvanhoesel.com/gnd1t/
Let’s see if I just sell everything I own and switch to this.
