Thunderbow!

The Remo Thunder Tube: Fun and hackneyed, but aggressive and unusual when played with an eBow!

My girlfriend bought be a Remo Thunder Tube as a gift, just as I was getting more comfortable with live microphone techniques and collecting acoustic noisemakers. It’s a spring going into a stretched material, like a drum head, which is surrounded by a high-density fiberboard tube. You shake it, the spring vibrates, and is amplified by the tube. And those lightning graphics? Sweet.

But then, as discussed earlier, the EBow came into my life.  I took one look at that spring and figured there might be EBow possibilities: it looked like a gigantic, loosely-wound guitar string. The results were pretty wild! The position of the microphone relative to the tube itself had a huge impact on the end result, but I wound up preferring the tone of the mic capsule being right at the lip of the open tube.

Listen below to the unprocessed original. (I did pitch shift this down 2 octaves, having tracked it at 192kHz, and it was wicked. Maybe more on that in a future post…)

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[OktavaMod MK012 mic w/ omni capsule into a Sound Devices 702 recorder]