Share your unorthodox techniques here

  • Thread starter Thread starter Whoopysnorp
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put a mini casette recorder in front of a drum set. it makes for great "break down" sounding drums. either that or take a mic and go into a slightly distorted guitar amp, and mic the amp for the same kind of sound.
 
I have messed around with this however have never had a use for it in a song, however try running your Drums sound through a flanger/phaser for an interesting effect.... might make an interesting sound in a Drum Solo...

Porter
 
Oasis used a flanger/chorus on there drums in one track that i can't remeber the name to at the momet, but it sounded "Weird" but cool. ;)

Z
 
Whoopysnorp said:
So now, I'm starting to get bored with doing things the normal way.
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Well...then do things you would normally avoid...

dunno, but it's up to yr creativity.

* Use crappy old Casio extra tiny keyboards instead of expensive synths.

* Play yr guitars through the cheapest amp possible...or thru your old stereo so you distort it bad.

* Play your amps in the closet.

* track yr vocals in the bathroom.

* sing twice the same lines...pan hard left and hard right using a different fx on each track...but record it twice...the slight differences will make it sound really nice.

* get a cheap piezo mic and toss it on the speaker cone of yr amp for solos... I LOVE THAT ONE!

* Play your guitar with a drumstick instead of a pick.

* Play a LOT with panning in the mix. Listen to The Beatles a lot. put all yr drums and bass on one side...

* place a mic inside a plasic bottle in front of yr amps.

* play the electric guitar totally unplugged so you get to record all the strings without an amp. Put that over the regular-recorded guitar track.

* Sing awfully close to yr mic. then double the track singing awfuly far away.

* stick a metallic piece on yr bass drum head and a coin on the bass drum pedal. Make it sound snappy.

* record your drums with one mic only...far away...so you have room. Do it mono or stereo with 2 mics.

* distort your drum track.

* record yr bassline. copy the track. pan one hard left and the other one hard right (both 100%). Reverse the phase of one of them...very sweet effect. Not MONO-COMPATIBLE though.

* Go record yr vocals inside your car. (get long cables!!)

* play some tv or white noise through a whole song in the background.

I don't know if this kind of stuff is what you are looking for...but it's entirely up to you...

1st rule: If it sounds good to you: then do it. If it sound like shit, and that is what you wanted...do it as well.

2nd rule: No "right" or "wrong".

3rd rule: NO RULES AT ALL.

Hope that is what you were looking for.

BE CREATIVE!

Peace...

PC
 
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detuned6 said:
1) never put a condensor in a kick drum, and leave it there for months.
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Never leave anything anywhere for months... it gets boring.
 
- Send your guitar out to two combo amps, and put the amps face to face. Play with the distance between them, the phase (if an option) and the volumes of each amp. Be very careful because this is a feedback nightmare, but when you get them to feed off eachother just right it's pretty friggin cool. Very interesting for bass too.

- The worst reverb sounds imaginable: you need a speaker & a mic. Try the inside of a kick drum or an empty computer case. Zonks.

- If you're into samples, a kick drum mallet on a washing machine sounds very cool when added to a dry kick sound. I suppose this could be done live too if you're weird.

- This is pretty common, but reverse your vocals and learn to sing them backwards, then record them singing backwards and reverse that track. I think they did that on Radiohead's Like Spinning Plates, but I'm not sure.

- Take a magnetic acoustic soundhole pickup and (literally) tape it to the bridge or neck (above the nut) of your electric. You kind of have to tape it on tight to avoid excess rattle, but the sound when mixed with the original guitar sound is neato.

- A couple ways I've found to make interesting "eerie" backgrounds: an electric shaver (the head kind, not the face kind) is an interesting ebow type sound, but you can add a lot of nasty scratch which can be cool. A power drill on its own can be minorly interesting, but put a square-handled screw driver in the drill (such that you're spinning the handle) and float it over your BASS strings such that it barely makes contact with the strings. Add reverb.

- It's hard to get a good sound by bowing an acoustic guitar, but if you replace your low E string with a medium high B string for a bass, you get more tone and it's easier to play...if you just need a single string, single octave part.

- A portable minidisc recorder and microphone is a great way to capture sounds out in the wild. Highly recommended.

- For soft, intimate vocals, I like to record the main track right up close to a LDC, but then I find it interesting to whisper (literally) the lyrics into something like an SM57...do this a few times and mix the whispered vocals low and wide with the original track. Kind of a sparklehorse trick. I used it here (not my final mix):
- whoa, that mp3 is titled Arti's Party by Alan Oehler because I didn't reset the tags in my mp3 encoder...oops! I must have been making comp cd samples.

- If you see some weird looking instrument type thing at a pawn shop that makes you go "what the fuck?" Buy it!

Slackmaster 2000
 
Oh yeah, one more:

- Split your bass signal and send one side clean through whatever your normal rig is. The other side run through a nasty distortion box and a delay that has a "swell" feature. Set the swell to come in kind of late. The result is a normal sounding plucked bass followed by this swell of grit. Add a trem set to hard knee and you can almost get a sort of moog follower on your bassline, it's weird.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Slackmaster2K said:
- For soft, intimate vocals, I like to record the main track right up close to a LDC, but then I find it interesting to whisper (literally) the lyrics into something like an SM57...do this a few times and mix the whispered vocals low and wide with the original track.
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Riders on the Storm!!!!
 
Funny thing was, I listened to that tune hundreds of times (being able to play the bass line and piano line at the same time got me into at least one band), NEVER noticed the whisper thing 'til last week.

I'm thinking that this bbs is opening my ears up to a lot that I've been missing...

Daf
 
PowerCouple and Slack...that's just the kind of stuff I was looking for. It never even occurs to me to think of stuff like that on my own.

Regarding the backwards singing thing, a friend of my dad's did that all the time in weird little art project he made many years ago. It sounds neat.
 
Some strange ideas:

Have a 2 or 3 year old sing your vocal track and mix it into yours for a weird effect.

Have someone with a resonant low voice to "be your bass guitar" singing the bass parts through a microphone with a little or a lot of distortion/fuzz. My friends and I recorded some cool tracks this way.

Record wildlife and randomly mix the noises in here and there.

Reverse your guitar track and put some delay on it then reverse it back to normal
 
I had a client who kept complaining his vocals weren't "trashy" enough. I finally got sick of his whining and went out into the back alley of my studio, emptied the huge 30 gallon metal trashcan out back and brought it back into the studio. I put a pzm on the bottom of it on the inside and took a small speaker at put it in the opening. Set it up through the auxillary send/return. Makeshift trashcan reverb "chamber" to make those vocals "oh so trashy." came out pretty good too with a little fuzzbox mixed in.
 
cheap key boards

It's fun to run casios through guitar processors and mess with all of the settings.. you can really get some cool sounds
 
Indeed!

We once placed a mic for a trumpet and used the mic through my guitar rig (Wah, flanger and distortion were used) craaaaaaaaaaazy. It was a "dance" song :D

Peace...

PC
 
Use a D112 to mic a guitar amp. I've never tryed this, but i've heard it can bring out the rich and fullness sound, that the guitar amp may be lacking.

Run a digital piano through a distortion pedal.

If you're using tape, record your vocie with the pitch down low and then play it back in the normal pitch for a chip 'n Dell sound.

Revurse your guitar solos. (The beatles! :D)

Apply distortion and overdrive to your drum tracks.
 
for guitar, i used a sm48 on the cone and a 1/4 preamp out and mixed the two out of phase with eachother, i also tried eq and distorting one or the other track, I also used the sm48 as a tom mic, since i had 6 of them lying around, it worked pretty good, i recorded the drums mixed them down to two tracks and ran them through a guitar distortion pedal, kinda weird, try recording vocals in the bathroom, for recording a choir once, i used pzm connected to a 2 foot square piece of plexiglass, that worked great. take a vocal mic, adapt the xlr to a 1/4, plug it into a peavey210 bandit with distrotion, mic the amp and record away,
 
On my synth I transposed a program down an octave and was able to take it down another octave with the transpose button on the board, then I ran it through my guitar processor and was able to take it down another two ocataves.. then I hit the lowest note on the keyboard.... pretty cool... it was like one low grinding sound every second... then I'd take the pitch wheel and bring it up and down... very cool sounding... I don't know if I'd actually use it in a recording tho. we'll see!
 
*cheap keyboards can be great. we still generally, for a good rodes sound, use my old yamaha on the accordian setting and run it through a trem with slight distortion on it instead of my friend's $1500 digial piano.

*i think i read this about Paul McCartney. he wanted more low end on a kick drum. so he took an old 12 inch speaker and put it in a cabinet and connected a 1/4 inch jack on it. plug that into your mixer and put it right up to the kick. we use that as our main kick mic. then usually a condenser off the top or side of the kick and it sounds great.

*automated delay can be real fun to on a vox track on just one word (recently, radiohead has been doing this a lot.)

*a SM57 on acoustic for more of that rock sound.

*stick a mic out a window on a windy day and record some wind blowing right into the capsule. throw some effects on and you've got yourself some weird noise

*if a snare sonds too boomy and doesn't have any of that snare snap and sizzle, first try a bit of distortion. but that may not work on the type of song your doing. so get a speaker, put a snare upside down on the top, solo the snare track, and put a 57 up to the springs and record that and mix with the original. THIS ONE ROCKS.

i'm sure i've got more. when you have a low budget and teach yourself this stuff, you come up with some crazy stuff.
 
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