Anyone tried a 57, rubber, and bucket of water?

  • Thread starter Thread starter tswsdrummer4
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tswsdrummer4 said:
I saw this while browsing the GS forums....if you aren't familiar with it, the idea is to put a 57 in a condom, then insert it into a half-full bucket of water and stick in a foot or so in front of a kick drum with the resonant head taken off. you would i suppose blend that with whatever micing technique you would normally use.

anyone tried this?
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That's all I do, except I don't use a 57. I just lie there... I like it, very peaceful. :)

There was an article I read once about how sticky the Abbey Road labcoat guys were. There's a story about John Lennon having a Neumann inside something like a plastic bag (or maybe a condom) and that was submerged in water in a bottle, and him scrambling to undo it when the labcoat guys appeared.
 
And if it fails as a mic tecnique at least you have some useful tools for extracting confessions from terror suspects
 
dintymoore said:
There was an article I read once about how sticky the Abbey Road labcoat guys were. There's a story about John Lennon having a Neumann inside something like a plastic bag (or maybe a condom) and that was submerged in water in a bottle, and him scrambling to undo it when the labcoat guys appeared.
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Huh, how about that - Is this it:

Experimenting

Emerick's experiments had very few boundaries. Everything came to a head one day when the Beatles wanted an underwater vocal sound for “Yellow Submarine,” and Emerick submerged a condom-covered microphone in a bottle of water (that technique was later made famous by sound designer Gary Rydstrom, using a Neumann and a bowl of oatmeal for the gooey sounds in Terminator 2: Judgment Day [Columbia Tristar, 1991]).

EMI's crusty studio manager, E. H. Fowler, chose that moment, when his still-new engineer was engaging in a bit of imprudent, potentially expensive, and decidedly improper youthful folly, to make an entrance. A quick but discreet scramble hid the bottle, and Emerick relaxed when the studio manager finally left, thinking that he was past the danger. Then it struck Emerick that the mic sitting in that bottle of water was phantom powered, and that someone could easily have gotten electrocuted if something had gone wrong. Oops.

?

Link
 
I know that while running live sound on a hot and humid day the bass seams to be missing only to have it travel a bit further back into the cheap seats, before earlier in the day when It was not as humid the bass would be thumping at FOH. sound travels differently through different mediums.



:cool:
 
TyphoidHippo said:
Huh, how about that - Is this it:

Experimenting... L]
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Sounds like it. The one I read involved John Lennon, but then we've all probably heard about the razor blade in the apple at Halloween or my favorite the chick on Spanish Fly and the shift lever... stories have a way of evolving over time.

In reality, the idea that you are going to get underwater sounds by doing something like that is a cool image but sonically I'd think it would be bullshit. More like something you'd try as a joke and somehow use the track just so you could say you did.
 
TyphoidHippo said:
Then it struck Emerick that the mic sitting in that bottle of water was phantom powered, and that someone could easily have gotten electrocuted if something had gone wrong. Oops.
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Phantom power was in its infancy while the Beatles were recording and typical current draws were a couple of mA, so preamps were built to supply that range of current. Even now the spec calls for something like 14mA. I could be wrong, but that doesn't sound like much of a risk.

On the other hand, with all the cabling running around, if there's not good safety grounding in the mains some spilled water on the floor could be dangerous.
 
I love reading about stuff like that and I hope to try some experiments like that in the future. For now I still suck at the basics so until I get that stuff down I'm not gonna try anything to weird. Right now using a room mic is about as far out there as I get.:o
 
Yonce N Mild said:
I love reading about stuff like that and I hope to try some experiments like that in the future. For now I still suck at the basics so until I get that stuff down I'm not gonna try anything to weird. Right now using a room mic is about as far out there as I get.:o
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you ANIMAL you. :cool:


:laughings:
 
bouldersoundguy said:
Phantom power was in its infancy while the Beatles were recording and typical current draws were a couple of mA, so preamps were built to supply that range of current. Even now the spec calls for something like 14mA. I could be wrong, but that doesn't sound like much of a risk.

On the other hand, with all the cabling running around, if there's not good safety grounding in the mains some spilled water on the floor could be dangerous.
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Interesting, well let's get to the bottom of it - I'm actually shoving a phantom-powered mic in a bucket of water to test this outtttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt




....ok, maybe he meant "shocked" :D I think some people don't realize that "electrocution" literally involves death, by definition.
 
tswsdrummer4 said:
I saw this while browsing the GS forums....if you aren't familiar with it, the idea is to put a 57 in a condom, then insert it into a half-full bucket of water and stick in a foot or so in front of a kick drum with the resonant head taken off. you would i suppose blend that with whatever micing technique you would normally use.

anyone tried this?
Click to expand...

dintymoore said:
There was an article I read once about how sticky the Abbey Road labcoat guys were. There's a story about John Lennon having a Neumann inside something like a plastic bag (or maybe a condom) and that was submerged in water in a bottle, and him scrambling to undo it when the labcoat guys appeared.
Click to expand...

This is taken from a superb book called "The Complete Beatles' recording sessions {The official story of the Abbey Road years 1962-1970}" by Mark Lewisohn

Had the Abbey Road studio personnel been given annual report cards like school children, a number would have been branded 'abuse of equipment', for in their efforts to innovate at the direct request of the Beatles, people often fell foul of the unwritten studio rules. Geoff Emerick vividly recalls one occasion. "John wanted a really unusual vocal sound so I suspended a very thin condenser microphone tied in a plastic bag inside a milk bottle filled with water. Lennon was singing at the top of his voice at this bottle when the studio manager came in. 'What's that noise? How are you getting that?' I was terrified! We both stood around the bottle, shoulders at all angles, trying to hide it."
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Whether this really happened is anyone's guess. What I find really irritating about the story is that they never tell us how it sounded; was it worth it, was it relatively shitty ? After the studio manager left, did they carry on with the session ? Did they ever try it out again ? Abuse of equipment was common to the Beatles from 1965 on. Nowadays, they're often standard recording techniques !
While I've never done the mic in a bag in water bit, I have used water quite a bit in one guise or another {flushing a loo makes a great sound effect}, the most memorable being when a percussionist friend of mine quarter filled one of my cooking pots with H2O and got a weird pitched instrument by turning the pot at various angles and striking it. Niiiiice.
 
Use a sm58 and you probably wouldn't even need to use a condom or bag. Just stick it down in the water without any protection. :D




 
Who do I smack up if I put my 58 in a bucket of water and it stops working ? The guys in these videos or Dastrick for posting them ? :D
 
mcmetal said:
That's got to be one of dumbest things i've read in a while.I'm no sound exepert but if it sounded that great everyone would be doing it.I can just imagine every band going into a studio and insisting their drummer plays under water.:laughings:
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i swear the gs guys throw this shit out there and come here to laugh their asses off. :laughings:
 
I think this thread has it all backwards, personally. I think it's the drummers who can't get a sound worth recording with a simple, single, dry, uncovered mic that should be wearing condoms and sticking their heads into buckets of water. ;)

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I think this thread has it all backwards, personally. I think it's the drummers who can't get a sound worth recording with a simple, single, dry, uncovered mic that should be wearing condoms and sticking their heads into buckets of water. ;)

G.
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Or better yet start a new rumor about how much faster eunuchs can play drums due to the lack of friction.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I think this thread has it all backwards, personally. I think it's the drummers who can't get a sound worth recording with a simple, single, dry, uncovered mic that should be wearing condoms and sticking their heads into buckets of water. ;)

G.
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I disagree. Condoms can break. Drummers should all have vasectomies. :laughings:
 
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