A multi-disciplinary journey in music, sound, and field recording.

Playing a Ruined Pickup Truck

Posted: August 29th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: field recording, found sound objects, music, sound design
This sweet ride sounded better than it looks.

This sweet ride sounded better than it looks.

I live near miles and miles of public open space trails, and there’s a ruined hulk of a blue pickup truck a couple of miles from my house. I see it whenever I hike, run, or bike by. It’s been there for years; someone drove it up incredibly steep fire roads and left it.

Some time ago I dragged a field recorder and a windscreen-protected shotgun microphone up those hills and spent an hour milking the rusting chassis for sound. As you can tell by the picture, it doesn’t look like there was much left, but I did get some pretty cool sounds out of it. Like the cigarette machine percussion loop from an earlier post, I’ve assembled the raw sounds into a drum kit. Here’s a quick sample for your  funky, semi-industrial percussion pleasure. No processing other than pitching 2 samples down a bit in the sampler and some compression and EQ in the final mix; it’s rendered as a usable loop, hence the sudden start and stop.

Ruined Pickup Percussion Loop by noisejockey
[Røde NTG-2 mic into Sound Devices 702 recorder, played in Logic Pro]

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3 Comments on “Playing a Ruined Pickup Truck”

  1. 1 JulesK said at 11:26 am on August 31st, 2009:

    This is hottt! How’d you get the bass tones? Nice work

  2. 2 Nathan said at 3:56 pm on August 31st, 2009:

    Hah, thanks! The bass tones are just me stomping right in the middle of the flatbed with my sneaker, which was doubled with a copy that was pitched down by about 5 semitones. I was holding the mic at about knee height.

  3. 3 marty said at 12:53 pm on September 1st, 2009:

    MOAR!!!


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