Think about it: Wound metal string under tension, wooden resonator. That’s all a guitar really is. What a wooden gate lacks is thickness, like a guitar, but at more than a meter in width and height, that’s a broad-enough surface to send air molecules running for cover.
I had to rosin the hell out of the bow to make it tacky enough to grip this oversized “string.” I found that also spreading rosin on the wrapped steel cable was helpful. I tuned the cable, as much as one can, by adjusting a turnbuckle.
I recorded in mid-side stereo. Today’s sample features is comprised of one mono track totally dry, one mono track run through Michael Norris’ Spectral Blurring effect, one mono track pitch-shifted down by 1.5 octaves, and the one stereo track pitch-shifted down by three octaves. Recording at 192Hz helps for such tomfoolery.
I apologize to my neighbhors for the unholy racket that I’m sure they thought was a demonic violin 101 class.
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/noisejockey/satans-violin-lesson” params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=dd0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ][Sennheiser MKH 50 and MKH 30 recorded as mid-side stereo into Sound Devices 702 recorder]
I’m pleased to offer the first video content on Noise Jockey, and outgrowth of an earlier post on recording bicycles. More to come.
Audio nerd bonus quiz: This was recorded double system with two microphones. The visible one was for the sound effect itself, aimed at the bike wheel. Where’s the other mic?
Horse hair, water, mic, and wok lid. Now we're cookin'!
My last post featured teensy finger cymbals being dipped in water while resonating, recorded with a submerged hydrophone. This time we go a bit bigger.
So, I played the wok lid with a violin bow as I moved it into and out of a tub of water, again with the trusty Aquarian H2a-XLR hydrophone tracking to a Sound Devices 702.  The H2a can be overly bright on some material, but for this stuff it was pretty good! (Next time I should record the above-water sound to a second channel with a small condenser mic for more mixing flexibility.)
The recording below is 100% unedited except for some slight compression and normalization.
Hydrophone + Ice + Tonic. Sound and cocktail design in one easy step.
The latest addition to my microphone quiver is the Aquarian H2a-XLR hydrophone. For less than US$200, you get a really well-built unit with a high specific gravity (less sway in moving water) and a thin, flexible cable with an extremely supple “hand.”
I also got the rubber cup that enables it to be used as a contact microphone, and I must say that it also excels in this capacity: Super-low noise and very articulate, even recording human heartbeats with clarity (Hint: Aim for the sternum, the pecs have too much muscle and fat in the way). The H2a’s weight, however, prevents it from being easily taped upside-down or held in odd positions like my other contact mics I’ve used inpreviousposts.
I can’t hope to improve upon Darren Blondin’s excellent review of the Aquarian H2a, so in the short term, I’ll instead offer some quick and dirty recording results with it, with perhaps some more detailed results and analyses in the future. (Oh yes, some very strange recordings to come…)
When the H2a came in, I placed this device in all the usual places you’d expect for some quick tests: the sink, the bathtub, the cats’ water fountain. But having just discovered some very tasty tonic water for making cocktails, it struck me that I’d not recorded carbonation before. After hearing the clear, but not overly-bright, tones of the carbonation, I decided to mix up the room-temperature tonic water with some ice cubes.
The ice’s cracking, melting, and expansion was largely in the same frequency neighborhood as the carbonation bubbles and added an interesting dimension to the sound. Some initial sound processing makes me think that melting ice in still water might make for a cool creature sound pitched down -3 octaves or so, but for today, let’s listen to the original recording, unadorned and unprocessed.
The humble Roomba: Only a mistake could make it sound cool.
We own two Roombas. When they’re not battling to the death like robotic Mexican cocks, they clean our floors.
I recorded one and, well, it wasn’t that interesting. A bit whiny. Not at all what one would expect from a 21st century robot: A lot of wide-spectrum noise without a lot of character.
But then I taped a contact microphone on the top of the Roomba…taped rather poorly, in fact. I followed it around all hunched over with a too-short cable, causing the contact mic to occasionally lift up from the Roomba’s chassis. (I could have turned it off to rig it properly, but y’know. Guy thing.) This sloppiness caused a pretty weird warbling as the flat piezo element wobbled around and slightly lifted off the robot’s chassis as it changed directions and the cable to the recorder alternated between taut and slack.
It sounded weird enough to post here, completely unedited other than trimming and normalizing, in all it’s lazy-man’s happy-accident glory.
Wicker’s very worst trait, however – the loud sound of it straining under pressure – finally, and sonically, piqued my interest. I picked up up a small wicker basket at the local Thrift Town. Such fibrous, cracking, and straining sounds have many uses in sound design, from metaphoric strains and stresses to emulating the deep creaks and groans of a pirate vessel at sea. A small basket won’t make loud and deeply resonant sounds “out of the box,” but hey, that’s what computers are for. After half an hour of coaxing sound out of one of these things, by the way, they do break. But there are a bunch more for $1.99 at the thrift store!
Here’s a sample of the wicker basket being manipulated with two hands, then pitch-shifted a couple of octaves for some wickery gravitas. It serves as great reminder of why sample rates as high as 192kHz are your friend, and that Oktava mics – even the OktavaMods – have too high of a noise floor for quiet sounds. :-(
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.
As an avid photographer and aficionado of the Strobist school of lighting, I’ve got a mixture of modern, high-tech flashguns and some older ones I’ve picked up for cheap on Craigslist. Their age discrepancies don’t have any impact on how well they work…but my aging flash units sure sound strange.
After taking a shot with any flash, you hear almost always hear the flashgun’s capacitors recharging for the next shot. But my Nikon SB-26 (about 15 years old now) makes this warbling, incredibly”digital” sound. They sound like a 2400 baud modem that’s half asleep and dreaming, or a sweeping sample-start effect heard in glitch-centric music. The sound is incredibly soft and high-pitched, so only my large condenser mic has the sufficiently low noise floor to capture the sound without a lot of hiss.
Possibly useful for other recharging or power-up effects, some grimy and gritty digital process, or as part of a data-transmission sound effect..?
I’m always looking for weird things that make noise. Some artists dig in crates for rare vinyl, but I dig for fresh sounds at the thrift store.
If I have one primary skill in life, it’s not being afraid to look or act like an idiot in public. This pays off big time as I go into a thrift store, start handling the merchandise, putting it up to my ear, and then handling an item like I intend to break it. Rinse, repeat. I must be a bundle of fun to watch.
Today’s Thrift Store Sound – the first in an occasional series! – come from the humble shoe stretcher. At the local Thrift Town in San Francisco’s Mission District, there’s a whole box full of them. As soon as I handled one, I looked at its components and realized the possibilities: Multiple springs under tension, a metal joint/ratchet, and several wooden parts, all put together loosely. This curio had a whole language it could speak, if only someone would record it…
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/5764080″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ee0000″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] [OktavaMod MK012 mic with cardioid capsule into Sound Devices 702 recorder]
