Synth Sounds with a Kazoo??

Chris K

New member
Seems like the "in thing" right now is to use instruments, sounds and techniques that are creatively "different" and (sometimes to a ridiculous degree) out of the box. My music tends to fall more on the acoustic side and heavy synths aren't really my thing, but I found myself playing around with one of those cheap little toy Kazoos today which got me thinking. 5 minutes later, I had a little kazoo track recorded in Cubase and was playing around with adding auto-tune, delay, reverb, octaver, flanger, distortion, EQ, etc. The sound possibilities were endless and some of them actually sounded like pretty legit synth sounds. Using the integrated Variaudio (similar to Melodyne) feature in Cubase, once recorded, the notes could be straightened quantized, and dragged around to different pitches just like any MIDI track. Pretty fun stuff!
Anyways, I'm not into techno type beats, so I will probably never actually use a kazoo this way in a recording. Just thought I'd pass on the silly idea incase it gets someone's wheels turning...

Anybody out there that has tried the same thing? What other out-of-the-box methods have you guys used to generate new sounds?
 
Thanks--that's a great idea!

Once thing that I did was record some patterns I tapped on an empty beer box. Did some digital trickery, and had some pretty mean beats.
 
I have a number of Reaper track templates for taking whatever weird sounds I'm recording and converting them into useful MIDI.

I also do a ton with randomized drums and synths. (e.g. YouTube)
 
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