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[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...