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]

Welcome to Noise Jockey.

I so don’t know what I’m doing. And that’s what makes it great.

Welcome to Noise Jockey, where I, Nathan Moody, will be chronicling my journey (some would argue my “descent”) into the world of audio, field recording, music, sound effects, sound mixing, and more. I’m a digital creative professional who has skirted the world of audio for over a dozen years, and usually acts as the audio advocate of whatever visual (and usually interactive) project I’m working on.

Dabbling in field recording and sound is certainly less of a hobby or pasttime than playing or recording music, but I think it’s on the rise. The surge in online video certainly calls for more finessed approaches to sound for picture. The availability of insanely advanced audio hardware at low prices is truly ushering in a golden age of new sound gathering. Call me a semi-professional, or obsessed/advanced amateur, or a tourist, but I’m having a blast. And I figured it’s time to share, not just successes, but missteps and mishaps.

Noise Jockey will feature notes from the field, sound experiments, cool samples, stories, techniques, and music. You are hopefully interested in the same, and might find some interesting insights from a highly visual person moving towards the sonic arts.

Let’s kick things off with some silliness: Here’s a short piece I performed on a Casio Magical Sound Dial toy keyboard, multitracked in Logic Pro. The sound was captured from the keyboard’s single speaker by a complete piece of crap Shure microphone (plenty of higher-fidelity sound to come in the future, don’t worry). It’s simple, silly, and I just love the 8-bit, overdriven-speaker sound.

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There is much more to come, so please stay tuned. Oh, and do feel free to also follow Noise Jockey on Twitter. Welcome!