ITEM NO. IRON-0010 "POTTY NOISE" MODIFIED PLAYSKOOL PS-635 TOY KEYBOARD SPECIAL FOR THE NOISY POT This short manual is intended as a reference. For a more intuitive guide, check the quick tutorial I posted for you here: https://jonirons.net/sound/potty-noise.html If you're reading this, you've won yourself a thirty-years-young toy keyboard with a number of fun, or at least noisy, modifications. Mystix contacted me about a month before the 16th August 2025 NOISY POT and asked if I would like to modify a toy that she and TRAUMATIZE already possessed. I agreed, and once I received PS-635 I could only approve of their choice. The factory organ sound is pretty huge, and the kick drum is gorgeous. I hope you enjoy discovering its new sounds as much as I did. While I've tried to make this instrument friendly for any gear with which it might interface, please keep in mind that it's a fucked-up electronic device. If you're plugging it into something, start with low volume on both ends of the connection (if applicable). Some of the modifications can cause things to be a bit louder than Playskool intended. But, unless you're hooking it up to something that shouldn't be anywhere near audio gear, this instrument is powered with three AA batteries, so probably can't do much harm outside your delicate, beautiful sense of hearing. Here are the modifications that correspond to the labels on the device, starting on the left side. MONO: A nominally "line level" mono output whose volume is constant regardless of the speaker/phones volume. Plugging into this jack does not disable the speaker/phones output, so you can monitor the sound independently of how it patches into the mix/amp/etc. This is a 1/8" TS (one channel) jack. SPKR: This latching on/off pushbutton controls whether the speaker/phones output produces sound. If you're using the MONO jack, and don't want the speaker to make noise, you can put this switch in the OFF (up/out) position. Inserting a plug into the phones jack does cut off the speaker, but this button can also be useful if you're using both jacks and don't want the speaker to kick in if you need to unplug the phones jack. I'm no expert but you'll probably also save some battery juice if you turn the speaker off when you don't need it. POTTY: A knob that controls the pitch of the keyboard voices, including its percussion. This does affect playback tempo. I have marked where my shitty ear thinks the knob matches the factory tuning. I've given the POTTY tuning a lot more room on the low side than on the high side. This knob does nothing unless the on/off switch to its right is ON (up). You'll probably notice pretty quickly that touching this switch with bare skin (or other conductive material)—in fact, even moving said material near it—messes with the pitch in its own small way. I salvaged this switch from a 50+ year-old power brick, so I'm not sure if this is a feature or a problem, but I like how it works here. Given that this point of contact goes through a relatively weak resistor and then into the main chip blob, you probably shouldn't touch it with anything electrified. XXXX: These two lever switches combine certain keyboard voices in a quick round-robin pattern. A given switch might not affect the current voice (green slide switch on the left side of the device), but all voices are covered between the two switches. The sound, especially if you tune the POTTY low, get really gruff and grumbly. This mod comes from the "Table Hooters" pages on WarrantyVoid/weltenschule.de, which suggests sticking the green voice select switch between two positions. The new switches make this way easier. XXXX #1 affects the piano and violin voices to a small extent, and #2 affects the organ and flute voices to a greater extent. I wanted to make an easy one-switch system, but I realized that (a) this setup allows for a little more variation, and (b) it also lets you keep a couple voices "normal" at any given time if you're inclined to cycle through them. NOISE: This momentary pushbutton switch and the lever switch to its right feed a noise source into the audio. I think the noise might actually be the base tone that the keyboard then modifies to produce the pitch of a given key, or maybe it's really just straight clock noise. Either way, it tracks the POTTY tuner. While just putting a constant tone into the audio isn't all that cool, these controls also trigger the last note you played on the keyboard, so you actually get a two-tone effect. As noted, the extra tone is around the same range as that of the keyboard, so you can use the tone as a drone around which to play notes at some interval. You can get some really nice beating notes, some really dissonant stuff, and some nasty lows. The lever switch lets you sustain this for as long as you like. At least one of the low keys, if held for certain voices, will cause even weirder 80s-computer-noise beep/boop glitches. Combine this with continuous pitch change via POTTY so you can make quasi-duophonic sounds, one following POTTY and the other trying to track the keyboard. Another favorite trick is using the momentary switch to follow standard notes with emphatic grace notes; you can use this as a low-risk way to explore which NOISEd notes sound good, at which point you can latch the NOISE for a sustained tone.