Innovative sounds & recording methods

[discomb]

Over the weekend I took my zoom H4 to my old parents house and recorded the sounds of doors opening and closing. very strange hearing sounds I used to hear for 20 odd years of my life coming out of my monitors!

I was in the garden waiting to record a tube train going past and a police helicopter appeared and hovered literally overhead! that sounds pretty good.

Recently I also sat at the back of a bus on the journey home from work - some very interesting harmonics in a powerful diesel engine

[The Bunk]

...a wooden spoon on the rim of a saucepan gives a lovely soft percussive sound; you know, when you've just stirred the contents and are tapping what's left on the spoon back into the pan. It helps to soften the sound if the spoon is old (which I guess means its soaked up a lot of water in its time) and the saucepan needs to have something in it - seriously! (usually chicken curry in my case)

[Martin Walker]

Hi The Bunk!

I hope you're creating your hi-hat sounds from breaking papadums as well.

The kitchen is a wonderful source of audio possibilities, from the saucepans you mention to cutlery, metal trays found inside the oven, glasses used as percussion/bells, and of course cutting up vegetables

Martin

[The Bunk]

Hi The Bunk!

I hope you're creating your hi-hat sounds from breaking papadums as well.

The kitchen is a wonderful source of audio possibilities, from the saucepans you mention to cutlery, metal trays found inside the oven, glasses used as percussion/bells, and of course cutting up vegetables

Martin

hmm, not tried those yet, but it's a little-known fact that the famous "aaaaaaargh" in Comfortbaly Numb is in fact taken from someone sampling my chicken vindaloo....

[Zukan]

hmm, not tried those yet, but it's a little-known fact that the famous "aaaaaaargh" in Comfortbaly Numb is in fact taken from someone sampling my chicken vindaloo....

I too had your vindaloo and am the source for the final impact moment in the film Comet.

[ZoeB]

Scraping the backs of two regular knives together can sound a bit like swords when pitched down a few octaves. For a nice synthetic old analogue drum machine style open hi-hat, try spraying an aerosol can. (I spent far too many years tracking before using a proper sequencer, so spent a lot of my teenage years finding weird household sounds to mangle.)

[Martin Walker]

...and don't forget while you're sampling your aerosols to capture the sound of them being tapped with a finger/beater/wooden spoon etc.

Especially when partly rather than completely full, they make wonderful pitch-wobbling waterphone-style percussive noises.

Try it!

Martin

[ToxicShock]

I once sampled the sound of me hitting a cheap dynamic mic on a loaf of bread, it made a dull thud but with a sharp percussive attack.

Also good fun is saying a sentence (or singing it) into a sampler, Reversing the sample and learning to say it phonetically. You then re-sample yourself saying (or singing) the backwards version and reverse it again. It never sounds like the original idea and sometimes can sound quite cool.

I got my friend to say Cheeky Monkey and went through the process. It ended up sounding like "Sheeky Mogwai"

[MarkOne]

One of the most interesting pad sounds I made was by sampling the fan on a backup hard drive that I had which was quite noisey, I used a SDC about half an inch from the fan and of centre so you didn't get the air noise.

I then pitched it down 2 octaves, used a resonant filter, an LFO or two. Slow Attack, bit of sustain. Very cool.

[Martin Walker]

Computers can be great sources of new sounds MarkOne. Once you open your ears to sound possibilities happening all around you, the sky's the limit!

Martin

[Richie Royale]

One of the most interesting pad sounds I made was by sampling the fan on a backup hard drive that I had which was quite noisey, I used a SDC about half an inch from the fan and of centre so you didn't get the air noise.

I then pitched it down 2 octaves, used a resonant filter, an LFO or two. Slow Attack, bit of sustain. Very cool.

My fan oven makes a great (or should that be grating) sound when it's on high and the door is open. If you then switch it off, it makes a lovely wind-down sound. It'll be sampled in due course!

[The Elf]

Never underestimate the joys of a plastic cup and a good microphone!

I've done everything from a horse race to a tropical rain storm, conga slap to saxophone valve clicks with that combination!

[geefunk]

I mostly try and use 'real' sounds in a lot of my recordings. From the obvious (rain, wind, etc) to the not so....

so far I have used:

The sound of a slug eating mildew off my shower curtain. great sound - a kind of 'rasping' - very close mic, dead of the night and holding my breath!

Zips

Rulers boinging on a desk (like you did in school)

old water cooler bottles for drum sounds

coin spins

coin scraping on zips

water shaking in bottles

burping

most of the above can be heard in my track 'soundhead is vulnerable' on my soundhead link below....

I spent a bit of time in NY, and wandered around with a mic - got a lot of snatched conversations, traffic noise, etc. All sorts of things can be used to good effect with the right editing. I interviewed an old man once about certain things to do with Bristol. he got more and more impatient, and his last sentence to me was 'I'm not interested in any of it' - great sample!

[Arglebargle]

During one recording session where I had brought all the toys (my big percussion bag), we got great sounds using a kid's toy called 'Spacephones'. Essentially a thin stretchy naked spring reverb with a plastic cone attached at each end. Affixed one end right in front of a microphone, and played with stretching the spring out, hitting it with chopsticks, running them along the length of it, etc. Great sounds. Hit the jackpot by stretching the spring to between 6 to 9 feet out and singing in falsetto through the free end. Got a wonderful etherial vocal sound.

[Martin Walker]

There are some seriously good suggestions tucked away in this thread

In my opinion the sign of a good sound designer is one who's ears are always open to new possibilities, however bizarre they initially seem.

And with that in mind, I created an excellent velocity-layered 'bass guitar' last week from tapping a vacuum cleaner plastic hose

Martin

[Zukan]

Would love to hear the vacuum bass thingy Martin.

I bet tuning it was fun huh?

[Martin Walker]

Now, now, no sniping please - I sttrreettcchheedd it

Martin

[Stephen Bennett]

Thanx Martinwalker. I think I'll love my presence among such knowers.

Anyhow, after starting this thread I did a little internet research and found this out -

http://www.pinoyexchange.com/forums/showthread.php?t=314644,

Its very interesting but some of them are sincerely mistaken there. For instance
'bananaboy' who said
"Jim Morrison of The Doors recorded the vocals on one of their songs (I forgot which) while a girl was, um, performing fellatio on him."

Now that is wrong. that incident occurred in elevator and Pamela (Jim's chick) happen to see all that. No recording of sound or visual was getting done.

What a preposterous myth!

Well, thanx everyone and please continue leaving some interesting dope.

I mixed my 1991 album 'Clarity', naked.

My compter drives generated so much heat that working in my non-air con studio was almost unbearable.

I'm not sure it generated any particularly innovative techniques though!

However, hanging a speaker over a three speed turntable with a cardboard tube on the platter with a few holes in it does create a nice doppler/leslie effect - with multiple speeds!

More hardware hacking http://www.digitalartistshandbook.org/hardware

Regards

Stephen

[Zukan]

Martin always works naked.

Infact, when he's at Expo the Sos stand has the longest queue (did that come across a bit porn?).

[Martin Walker]

Untrue

The reason that the SOS stand alwyas has a long queue is that we take our time chatting to people

Interesting link from Stephen though - thanks for that!

Martin

[xinaesthetic]

I stuck four contact mics close to the corners of a round metal table once and used it as a percussion instrument (EDIT: by close to the corners, I mean equidistant around - obviously circles have quite a few corners)... played back through a quad setup, it actually got pretty good spatial imaging, from hitting and scraping different parts of it. It also worked surprisingly well recording overdubs; each layer remained fairly coherent and defined.

Recently, I've discovered the joy of preparing strings with alligator clips: inspired by this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPIGkKxwgcQ and also quite effective for more percussive use (quite gamelan-esque sounds). Similar kinds of stuff to the album 'Stick Music' by the Clogs, which I adore.

Slinkys are good. Sliiiiiinky even better: http://www.firstpr.com.au/slinky/audio/

I made a synthesiser in Reaktor ages ago which used some quasi-physical modelling (lots of short delay lines with some filtering), fed by contact mics attached to the surface of my laptop (with the lid closed); so I could touch it gently with my fingertips or whack it with a pen and it would respond quite naturally with some of the dynamics of an acoustic instrument (but warping and morphing in impossible ways).

I might get hold of a couple of soundbugs one day, for routing signals through real acoustic objects. Does anyone have any experience with them? http://www.paramountzone.com/soundbug.htm

Cheers all!

[Martin Walker]

Nice links xinaesthetic!

Having watched the YouTube video of the prepared guitar I'll certainly be buying some alligator clips tomorrow

Those soundbugs also look most interesting, especially at just £24.99

Keep those quirky sound design links coming!

martin

[xinaesthetic]

A hydrophone is another thing on my potential shopping list at the moment, to complement my underwater camera. Again, pretty cheap at £30. Since this is quite niché, I think if you want higher quality you end up looking at much much more expensive devices.

FWIW, as a graduate of 'Sonic Arts' at Middlesex, I have more experience of the unusual side of things than I do of actually recording normal music.
sadly, I hear that course is being shut down.

I wish everyone happy listening, playing, tweaking... mostly listening. Re the comment earlier about carrying a recorder around routinely: even if you don't gather useful sounds for music, this can completely transform your perception of the environment. Note to self: do more of this.

For anyone interested in field recording of nature; it may be worth setting up equipment and leaving it to record for a while, so that any person-shy creatures are not scared away and you don't have to stay unnaturally still for prolonged periods. I've not tried this myself, I read it at http://www.franciscolopez.net/amazon.html ... guess things are a bit different in the Amazon, though.

[geefunk]

Another one of my own projects was to record the sound of a completely blank 7" single. The 'sound' I got was just a gentle hiss and crackle, but enough to manipulate in a sampler to produce this...

blank record

[Martin Walker]

A hydrophone is another thing on my potential shopping list at the moment, to complement my underwater camera. Again, pretty cheap at £30.

Yeah - I was reading that page myself only a couple of days ago. Interesting stuff. You could make your own, but JrF prices are indeed very reasonable.

Martin