Push the Button and Turn the Knob with the Bleepler Synth Toy

I first met Langel Bookbinder at a local chiptune event in the Ann Arbor area, and most recently saw him when he kindly dropped my copy of his homebrew lo-fi NES shooter GunTneR off at my house. I don’t claim to understand how Langel’s mind works, but he’s always coming up with some unhinged project or other, and they are all bangers. So of course I was intrigued when I learned of his new creation: Bleepler.

Bleepler is a handheld synthesizer toy that you can assemble yourself, or if you’d prefer, a ready-to-go kit with no soldering required. Deceptively simple, the instrument consists of a single mechanical keyboard key and a potentiometer, which together result in the eponymous “bleeple” sound emanating from the on-board speaker. Actually, perhaps the simplicity is not that deceptive: the button controls the flow of power from the battery, and the knob controls the pitch. Kind of like this:

Bleepler is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, with just three days to go, so if you’re intrigued by this quirky handheld chiptune fidget synthesizer, get the bleep over to their campaign page right now! But don’t blame me if you end up with “Push the Button and Turn the Knob” stuck in your head for the rest of the day!