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[Fibes]

Some things are not what they seem, like a snare crafted from white noise, a kick from a 60hz tone and keys used as a tamborine. Those tricks are the norm, let's discuss some other non-traditional ways to get sounds for your production that lie outside of the usual pick/guitar, stick/drum method. These unusual/simulating sounds can come from traditional instruments utilized in non-traditional ways what are some of your faves?

Here are a few of mine that come to mind:

1. A Sucrets/Altoids box with a few Joja roaches/palmetto bugs miced up and run through some delay and pitch shift. Great organic percussion/pad.

2. Playing the guitar with a paint brush in an open tuning. Stack a couple tracks of this crap and who needs a synth for pads?

3. Tuning the guitar to an open chord or unison and laying it in front of a cranked amp for a wonderfully out of control feedback pad. Some tapping on the guitar can add a percussive element or an ebow laid on the strings can keep a specific tonal center.

4. Placing a pencil under the D string at the 11th fret. You have instant koto from both sides of the pencil. it's gotta be the 11th fret for even temperment.

5. Anyone who has an original Vox tonebender can unplug the input slightly and have an instant oscillator controlled by the volume and distortion controls.

That's a start, what are some of your faves?

[j.hall]

cardboard box with a floor tom above it.

mic the box (kick drum)
mic the floor tom (sustain)

broom stick, weed wacker string (yeah the plastic stuff), old school wash tub with hole drilled in it for the broom stick handle to get leverage.

wash tub bass......pull the stick back for higher notes....

i recorded a guy with this thing, his pitch was INSANE.

one of the most creative recordists i've met is scott solter.  works at tiny telephone (john vanderslice's joint)

read these credits for some of the crazy stuff he dreams up:

http://www.johnvanderslice.com/html/credits_cd.html

[Eddie Matthews]

Okay, J.  I just went to that link and now I'm curious.

Just what does a detuned fireplace sound like?

[chrisrnps]

Bag Of Frozen Peas Snare Drum

Slamming Door Kick Drum

Bowed Cymbal Ersatz Feedbacky-Didgeridoo Drone Thing

Clothes Washer and Dryer Percussion Section (used on a song instead of hi-hat track; two people playing the outside w/ drumsticks and slamming the washer/dryer doors on 2 and 4)

Touching-The-Tip-Of-A-Guitar-Cable-Plugged-Into-An-Amp 60Hz One-Note Bassline

Salad Shooter Reeves Gabrels Impression

Electric Toothbrush And Pitch Shifter 'Theremin' (thumb on the bristles to slow down the motor is your pitch control)

Oven Rack 'Guiro Of Doom'

Angle Grinder On Military Surplus Oil Drum

[Ross Hogarth]

Cool stuff .. this is the shit I love ... making sound out of nothing

On "Rain on the Scarecrow" we had kenny aronoff double his snare drum back beats with a hammer hitting a fire extinguisher ...

on REM 's " Life's Rich Pageant"  I spent a week of off time in the kitchen tuning wine glasses with water in them for the "glass harmonium sound on "Flowers of Guatemala"

On a record with my buddy Stan Lynch playing percussion we had him play his chest with his hands for a real slapstick sound

Many many times for percussion instead of finding a loop or looking for the right loop, I mouth it into a 57 or a green bullet mic and record it and then chop it and degrade it and delay it and no one ever knows how the hell that loop was made.

Fletcher will like this one... I had recorded my bike idling, then found the coolest loop , used pitch and time to fit it in the track and used that on a  song as a loop

this is just my tip of the iceberg ......

[j.hall]

Delta-9 wrote on Mon, 03 May 2004 13:45

Okay, J.  I just went to that link and now I'm curious. Just what does a detuned fireplace sound like?

man, i haven't a clue.  there are some really cool sounds on the record.  stuff that you would never think of putting on a track and scott gets it to work brilliantly.

i'll have to give him a call and find out about the fireplace......

[Jason Phair]

For screaming vocals...have them scream into the batter head of a snare drum, use an over the shoulder to pick up the scream, and then mic the snares.  Blend in the snare mic to add some natural sounding distortion.

Also, for super low death metal growls, a kickdrum works well as a resonant chamber.

[Fibes]

phairphunk wrote on Tue, 04 May 2004 12:05

For screaming vocals...have them scream into the batter head of a snare drum, use an over the shoulder to pick up the scream, and then mic the snares.  Blend in the snare mic to add some natural sounding distortion. .

Yeah! I've tried that. We also had a drummer that was having a hard time doing some shuffle/grace fills in this really cool groove along with all the other stuff he was doing so instead of him overdubbing him playing the snare, which never felt right, I beat boxed/mouthed the part into a mic, through a guitar amp which was in front of a snare miced with a 57. Redrum without the sticks!

[j.hall]

Fibes wrote on Tue, 04 May 2004 11:19

Redrum

can you market that as a product?

[otek]

A bunch of spaghetti duct-taped at one end, and played between your thumb and fingers on one hand, makes for really intricate and cool shaker patterns. Sounds lovely too.

Vocals through a long paper roll, the kind that is used to transport blueprints and paintings. Gets this weird, flanged sound.

Sticking a mic inside of a glass bottle or a vase, and putting it in front of a string section, drum kit, or whatever. David Lynch used this one for the soundtrack to "Lost Highway".

Someone suggested hooking up a distortion pedal the wrong way. Hooking up a wah-wah backwards allows you to play the pitch of the oscillated tone with the pedal.

Included a sound clip of an old, old, old demo I did for a local band; the weird bweep-bweep noises panned to the right are the wah pedal hooked up backwards.

[chrisrnps]

Quote:

A bunch of spaghetti duct-taped at one end, and played between your thumb and fingers on one hand, makes for really intricate and cool shaker patterns. Sounds lovely too.

I dunno, I can't really seem to find good attack and release settings for a wet 'splat'. And anyone know how to get marinara out of a small-diaphragm condenser?

Wait...you meant uncooked spaghetti? Dammit!

[Zoesch]

I learnt a bunch of tricks after years and years of listening to Einsturzende Neubauten.

Oil drums make for excellent kicks!
Taping a small sheet of metal to the beater side of the kick.
Placing a slide under the frets of a bass guitar and then hiting it with a bow.
Setting a shopping cart on fire and recording the sound of metal shrieking (Do not try this indoors or whit a Neumann)
Putting uncooked pasta or coins inside of the snare
Stretching a bass string and running a dremmel drill over it (Actually done it straight on the bass, nice hoover impression with massive bottom end)
Micing an amp from behind a thin sheet of metal at INSANE volumes.

Ahh the fun...

[otek]

chrisrnps wrote on Wed, 05 May 2004 00:02

I dunno, I can't really seem to find good attack and release settings for a wet 'splat'. And anyone know how to get marinara out of a small-diaphragm condenser? Wait...you meant uncooked spaghetti? Dammit!

LMFBO!!!!  


Record that and it will sound like someone jerking off.

[j.hall]

Delta-9 wrote on Mon, 03 May 2004 13:45

Okay, J.  I just went to that link and now I'm curious. Just what does a detuned fireplace sound like?

just got an email from scott

he says:

I recorded a fireplace with the intention of
using
it on another record. While listening to it I heard a soft whistling
sound
that was air escaping from a piece of wood as it burned. The whistle
had a
pitch to it and so I pitched it down until it had a murky musicality.
During recording of that  JV piece it occurred to me that that
particular
"detuned" ambience would fit the song.
All the best, Scott

that is what a detuned fire place is.

[natpub]

probably a common one, hang a 57 from the ceiling over something like an NS10, about a foot up, set levels at the edge of feedback and start your signal into the speaker. then swing the mic in random patters--dopplers out whatever signal you have in a subtle way with random patterns....ride the volume to introject feedback edges to taste

[drumsound]

I once rubbed my shirt for percussion on a record.  I also have a tune on my first solo record (done on 4-track cassette!) called "Found Sounds."  The instruments are washboard, two office water bottles, assorted brake drums (melody) and....








































A Kitchen Sink, really!

[Fulcrum]

I think I put this one up on the old Rec Pit. An electric Hawaiian guitar (no I do not mean a ukelele) struck/tapped with a drum stick. Sounds like a pitched thunderclap.

Might even work with a regular electric, though I would guess you might drive the strings right into the pickups.

[music]

Screaming into a guitar pickup gives a cool ambient effect. Placing Shells, cans and unusual objects in the shower and letting the shower water hit them is a cool rainish effect. Putting a mic up to a ceiling fan and having the singer yell or sing into the blades from a couple feet away is a pretty cool effect as well.

[Zoesch]

music wrote on Sat, 15 May 2004 11:42

Screaming into a guitar pickup gives a cool ambient effect. Placing Shells, cans and unusual objects in the shower and letting the shower water hit them is a cool rainish effect. Putting a mic up to a ceiling fan and having the singer yell or sing into the blades from a couple feet away is a pretty cool effect as well.

Playing back a tape recorder into the guitar pickups while holding chords or playing a choppy riff (Or even better, just doing controlled feedback) also gives out weird but wonderful ambient effect.

[Fibes]

Yeah Zoesch! Pickups, especially cheap microphonic ones are great tools. We used an old Melody maker as an effect for another les Paul track this past week. Keeping the feedback in control is tricky but damn it's good.

Some other funky things we've been playing with lately are: recording instruments while dragging a PZM mic across the floor, dropping a lapel mic into the shower drain for guitar tones (it didn't really work) and triggering (heavily filtered) guitars with toms. The wah wah snare still hasn't worked for me yet.

Don't be bashfull y'all, keep 'em coming.

[Zoesch]

On the subject of cheap microphones... I've placed one of those cheapo computer mics on the ground in front of the vocalist, cranked the gain of the pre, into one channel of a stereo delay then into a compressor, compressed to high hell (High rate, fast attack, fast release and a moderately low threshold) and back into the other channel of the delay, for added weirdness place a nice filter on the sidechain input of the compressor and run the drum tracks through, sweep around focussing on a specific frequency that gives you a rythmic groove you like.

Presto! Instant rythmic vocal drones and pure industrial nirvana.

[J.J. Blair]

Josh Freese showed up at my studio for a session and there were a shitload of Sweet and Low packets inside his kick drum.  I asked him why they were there, and he said, "Because that's how I like my kick to sound - sweet and low."  (That's very Josh.)

I was at Sunset Sound and there was a tympani in the tracking room.  Jack Irons was the drummer and had an empty water cooler bottle that he was playing on with his sticks.  I heard the tympani resonating, so I started playing with the pedal, changing the pitch while it resonated symapthically with the water bottle.  We stuck a C12 on the tympani and recorded only the head resonating to the rhythm, changing pitch with the tune.

The back beat to "Dancing In the Street" is somebody hitting a piece of plywood with a heavy chain.  

That's all I can remember this early in the morning...