your strangest recording ideas?

[cello_pudding]

yesterday i had an intense idea for recording vocals.

first, i want to open the strings by pressing my piano pedal...then while recording vox to have a few amps that have the vox blaring out of them right by the piano strings in a different room.

then i would have to buy a bunch of pickups to line the entire piano (i know vocal range isn't an entire piano but harmonics of the voice are) and send to a trs 1/4 to some effect pedals. distortion/phase/wahwah....and record and play the vox track and the string vibrating piano track at the same time.

that could be really cool for live shows as well. if you sat down at the piano and played the effect pedals as well as the piano pedals, i bet you could get some interesting sounds.

 

[mjm620]

What would you expect it to sound like? Just curious...

 

[daav]

Interesting idea, if a little large-scale.

On a similar track, a freind of mine took an old mountain bike, repalces all the spokes on one side with bass strings and rigged some way to tune the strings. He then mounted a pickup to the bike frame and a pick a bit furhter off. Mounted the whole thing on a stand that turned it into a stationary bike. Just for flair, he then glued fake fur all over it that was about 4 inches long. This became the infamous "hair bike".

At shows, he would get on the bike and ride it, as the wheel turned it would play a rythym of sorts, with a bit of "pink plonk" tone. He would play the bass while pedaling the bike and the rest of the band would noodel around ala MMW or various hippie jam bands. Sometimes they would get another friend to paint himself silver, call him "Perpetual Harry" and ride the bike, while ranting about all sort of crazy nonsense while the band went crazy in the background, and they would project images onto a screen of Harry (in full silver skin-tight outfit) doing oddball things like frying bacon and mowing the lawn.

Can;t say i ever "got" it, but it was always fun as hell to watch.

Daav

 

[c7sus]

Recording wind chimes suspended from a mic stand in the living room and using a Moog analog delay pedal and a Moog CP-251 to "tune" the pitches to play a melody line. Actually morphing the pitch is more accurate. Like a whammy bar, but controllable with oscillators or CV pedals.

With a sequencer that could output CV it could probably even be done in real time. Every step would assign a different CV to the delay time control in the AD, changing the pitch of the chimes in realtime. The result should sound pretty ghostly really. Especially with a lot of plate reverb. With a lag processor like the CP-251 has you could change the speed of the morph.

Oh, and putting that video camera in the locker room of the Seagals!

 

[casualtyfigure]

i think this qualifies.

I once built a make shift multitrack.
Using 2 seperate cassette decks,
and various adaptors from radioshack.

One cassette deck was a dual well,
and the other...A talk boy. (from home alone!)
The speed control was REALLY nice.

input------------\----\
| |
Cassettedeck----/----/

2to one adapt.----}---{f-f adapt----car CD to tape>

<Car CD to tape adapt-------Playback side of dual cassette deck,
and record on the other

Car CD to Tape= Cassette with a wire coming out of it.

If you pay attention, and properly rotate the tapes,
You can layer sound on top of sound.


This was actually my first multitrack experience.
All i had was a rhythmic 8 keyboard, and DOD Analog Delay pedal,
And a guyatone Harmonic Distortion pedal, and a microphone.

which was ultra cheap headphones,
with inverted polarity, and heavily distorted.

The results were increasingly muddled...
But i was so proud of the setup.

I was thinking of setting this up again.


***ill make a better diagram later if interested.

 

[simpleybass]

You guys ever heard the paradox "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a noise"?

One time I decicided to try recording the sound of a tree falling in the woods while no-one was around to see if it made any noise.

I went way out in the woods and found a dead tree that looked ready to fall. It was way out there. I set up a portable cassette recorder with 120 minute tape, hit record, then ran back down the trail to my car and drove away.

I had to make sure I was far away so I wouldn't hear the tree fall (so I would not affect my scientific experiment).

I went back an hour later (one side of the tape), unfortunately the tree had not fallen.

I put in a fresh tape (always use fresh tape), and repeated the experiment.

Well, when I went back, same story, the tree had not fallen.

3 days and 25 cassettes later, the damn tree still didn't fall.

So I found another precarious looking tree in a different part of the woods and tried again.

Guess what... 4 more days and 33 more cassettes, still nothing!

So I got fed up and went home for my chainsaw, and cut the damn tree down. I proceeded to hack at it for hours with my axe just to release some frustration.

Some of those sounds came out pretty good, I must say. The chainsaw was a bit distorted though, I think I need to go digital.

Anyhow, a few weeks later I decided to stop taking speed, and I started smoking weed, and built a bike covered in hair with bass strings for spokes.

Man, that thing was fun to ride! Especially if I was eating a twinkie with peanut butter on it.

 

[cello_pudding]

the piano strings that would vibrate would be the same notes that the singer sang. with a crazy melody it would be pretty stupid...but slower melodies and esp sustained notes it would be cool. obviously you would shape your music around the instrument...

the reason for the pickups is so the bleed from the voice wouldn't be picked up, and would be completely converted to a "wet" signal which would have some interesting sounds especially with the pedals on it

 

[rory]

Theres an instrument called the Ondes Mardinot (not sure about the spelling) that was basically a theremin controlled by a ring around a string that was next to a keyboard so you could match pitch. It had a speaker box with strings attached that you could tune so that the melody would, through sympathetic resonance, trigger the strings. Thats kind of what you're talking about I imagine. Radiohead uses that idea a lot. Sounds very cool.

Rory

 

[mikeh]

Many, many years ago we recorded our bass player puking. We used a small portable mono deck and then duped that onto a Fostex 4 track. We assigned various processing and even tried to reverse the tape (you gotta admit, a backward puking sound has potential).

It really had no artistic merit (for that matter no social merit either).

Thinking back, if we would have spent as much time on a real song (vs. puke in Gm) the band may have actually made some money

 

[lucky13]

For snare drum, if I'm having a hard time getting a good balance between snap and ring I'll use this trick I got out of EQ Magazine.

Using a cigarette you burn a hole in the bottom snare head. Then you get a lavalier mic and put tape around the clip. Then I suspend the lavalier so it's just hanging inside the snare drum. It works well.

The two times I've done this, I told the drummer exactly what I was going to do. Yet, when I actually start burning the head they both freaked out....until they heard the tone, then they were o.k. with it.

 

[aoki saburo]

that sounds cool but...

i can't quite see it, (the lavalier mic inside the snare drum thing), so could you explain just a little more?

do you burn the hole in the middle? the edge? how do you hang something pointing up? tape it to the shell on the inside? sounds really interesting - and no hihat bleed!? sweeeett..... so if you have some time, please explain further...

cheers,
saburo

 

[Agent47]

When I was a kid I used to record my voice reading magazine adverts, and layer them on top of each other using a double-cassette recorder and microphone. In the end there were like 10-20 of me reading this stuff.





...Not that fantastic really. Don't know why I posted this...

 

[elmerfunk]

Lucky 13,

This has my interest also....elaborate more on this...I agree with aoki...NO HI HAT BLEED. In the past (when I have not been able to get a good tom sound) I have taken the bottom heads off the toms and put the mic inside the drum and gotten some great tom sounds. It's a lot of work, but sometimes so is tuning, taping, untaping, swapping mics, etc. Drummers flip out too....I am a drummer myself... as long as it sounds good on tape who cares.

 

[funkydrummer]

i just thought of something to do for my next album. i am going to take batter heads off two of my kick drums and tune the resonant head fairly tight. then, turn the drum facing up with a mic placed inside. record a part playing with malletes to tape. then, turn the tape backwards and dump it in to the rest of the song as a percussion overdub. i may add tambourine and shakers to the backwards part, as long as it doesnt sound too busy.

 

[lucky13]

i can't quite see it, (the lavalier mic inside the snare drum thing), so could you explain just a little more?

do you burn the hole in the middle? the edge? how do you hang something pointing up? tape it to the shell on the inside? sounds really interesting - and no hihat bleed!? sweeeett..... so if you have some time, please explain further...

cheers,
saburo

When I read about it in EQ it didn't give those details, so I had to play with it and I'm still experimenting and fine tuning it. I'm not sure if this is the best way, but this is what I did.

I burned the hole a couple of inches to the side of the snares. I wasn't worried about the direction the mic was facing because at the time I was thinking the sound is spread out equally inside the drum, but thinking about it more, this isn't true. Your going to get a stronger attack if you face the mic upwards as opposed to downwards. But I didn't worry about the direction, and I still liked the sound. I used duct tape because it's got a stronger grip than anything else. I just wrapped the tape around the lavalier clip, and left like an inch and a half tail. I used a drumstick to push the tape up and stick it to the top head. I was worried about the tape on the head affecting the sound of the drum, but I only noticed a little difference, and I still liked the tone, and I go by the rule that if it sounds good it is good. This is different than what I read in the article, they made it sound like it was one long piece of tape that went from one side of the shell to the other side, and suspended the mic in the middle. I couldn't figure out how to do this. When placing the mic, I tried to get it as close to center as possible, because I was thinking that there would be some weird phasing if it was too far off center. I'm not sure if this is true, but that's what I'm thinking.

I've only tried this twice, with friends of mine because they don't mind if I take an hour trying to make a mic float inside their snare. Still trying to work out some kinks, but it's fun and you get a cool tone. There is still a little hat bleed, but it is A LOT less. Hope this helps, unfortunately the computer I use in the studio is not hooked up to the internet, and I can't upload files from work here, so I can't post a track so you guys can hear how it sounds. But try it out, and if you think of anything cool to tweak this a little more, let me know.

 

[TexRoadkill]

You would be more likely to have phase problems the mic in the middle. Try putting it about 1/3 of the way towards either head. You can use a paper clip for a mini mic stand.

 

[phaqu]

Taped a PZM (unbalanced)to the back of a 12 string, ran through a voodoo valve(for distortion & fx). Mixed it with a mic-ed sound.Pretty cool.

 

[chessrock]

I once recorded an entire band as we freefalled during a skydiving excursion.

.

 

[chizzy]

We once ran a lead guitar melody out to the studio and into one of those Marshall Micro amps, the battery-powered things (we were/are a shoegazer-type band). We duct-taped one of those plastic corrugated tubes that you swing around to produce different tones (tho any corrugated 1 1/2" plastic tube would work) to the speaker. Then we played it back, and waved the tube back & forth in front of an LDC in time with the music to make a sort of leslie effect. it sounded great. You can even get crazy doppler effects moving the tube to and away from the mic.

 

[Fletcher]

I taped a "PZM" mic to a drummer's shirt once so that as he moved around the kit the mic would follow him. It was a fairly cool texture... and it made it so the annoying bastard couldn't come into the control room without untangling a bunch of wires [an added bonus!!].

The brick on the sustain pedal of a Piano with a speaker underneath and the Piano mic'ed as a Piano is usually mic'ed is a technique that has been around for decades. It's a cool technique to say the least... however, if you tune your piano to "442" so it's a little 'bright' in the rock and roll realm, then the rest of your music best be tuned to "442' as well or you'll get a tension that is not always the desired effect.

"A=442" is our house tuning standard... it's got a bit of extra zip and energy than A=440.