New project bending an xl to add glitching and distortion

Hey guys I'm starting a new project in my lab this week. I have an extra mpc 2000xl that I have decided to bend. I searched the forum on here and haven't found any threads where anyone has actually done it. And found alot of people who don't seem to understand the Benefit to bending a sampler... Circuit bent samplers can be pretty amazing so why not bend one of my favorite samplers? I'm going to be adding logo distortion, sequencer glitching, sample playback speed glitches, and hopefully more. This project may take a while as due to high voltages I'm gonna need to study the board on it a good bit before making any bends do as to hopefully not fry it. If anyone else has done a bend project on an mpc (non500) hit me up.

Samplers that get circuit bent are usually chosen because they are cheap ($50 - $100). If they get fried it's not that big of a deal to throw them out. And they do get fried more often than not.

The reason nobody's messed with the MPC 2000XL is the cost.

For the price of a MPC 2000XL you could get 5 - 10 cheap Akai Samplers (S01,S20,S2000,S3000XL, etc).

If you can afford the risk of ruining a $500 MPC 2000XL then by all means go for it and post your results. If this is your first circuit bend, you should start with a cheaper unit to mess around with. Good luck!

yo man, bent samplers are really cool.

but slow down a second ... do you know what you are getting into?

do you understand the difference between an inherently digital vs analog device?

bending usually works best on more analog components, because they have a pretty high tolerance of what kind of voltage they will accept.
i am not talking about 'analog synths'...i'm talking about gear (even digital) with lots of analog components like resistors and caps etc inside it leading to very basic digital chips.

the issue with an mpc is that the chips are actually really complex, and this is a VERY digital device. if you start poking weird voltages around, you are likely going to crash the machine HARD, and very quickly.
i'm talkin unrecoverable shit right here.

case in point, i have bent many many machines. you can tell by looking at them what is good. you can open up an hr 16 and see lots of components and then two very basic eeprom chips sitting in there. the point is, there's lots of smaller components that make up the larger device. and the chips are very, very basic.
on the contrary, once i opened up a nintendo 64 and it was just a few components and a big black chip in the middle. the second i stuck my probe inside it, it fried.

you mention a lot of very specific bends and thats great, but do you know how those work?
for example, sample speed mod, this involves usually interrupting or sending a new clock to a sort of basic cpu chip that is reading samples stored on an eeprom-type chip, not out of ram. if you mess with the clock you are likely going to just crash the sampler.

now the good news
some more advanced digital samplers CAN be bent. i have heard some incredible bends done from akai s20.
the key thing in that instance though, is they found the chip that basically controls memory access, and they kept their bends isolated to that area. again, with the complex digital devices you have a lot less room to mess up sending random voltage around. the bends sounded super glitchy and stuttering samples was the main bend they got, but nothing as simple or controllable as sample speed playback.

so tread carefully. an xl is still worth about $500, and its not what i would call prime bending material. if you are gonna do it make sure you know exactly what you are getting into and be prepared to just not have a working at all xl anymore if you cross the wrong contacts.