By any means necessary

[Dean Roddey]

I'm always interested at how so many artists are good at using sounds all around them, while I'm just a completely boring geek who can't get beyond guitar bass and drums and organ sometimes it seems. We obsess about the equipment a lot, but often forget that there's equipment all around us if we are creative enough to recognize it an dmake use of it.

Some that I just happened to have come across in the last couple days:

- Imogen Heap. I like her stuff, and she has this video blog I check once in a while. She was showing some stuff she was working on in the latest ones. She was playing the overhead lights with drum mallets. And one of those tubes that you whirl around. And a game boy, etc... Stuff that I'd never have thought of trying, despite trying to think about such things a lot.

- Watching Classic Albums : Rumours the other night. One of the songs has a very prominent percussion part that's played on a chair. It's a really big part of the song and a sound you'd probably not get any other way.

- Watching Classic Albums : A Night at the Opera. They did lots of stuff. There's a little tap dancing thing in Seaside Rendevous which they did with thimbles on their fingers, and a little brass band thing that they did by just faking the sounds with their mouths. May's creation of a Dixieland band with the guitar.


I really need to work on that more and make use of these things. I notice them, very much. I'm one of those folks who immediately perks up his ears at interesting sounds from the most mundane sources. But I never seem to get around to trying to use them. Maybe it's because I'm still struggling to just do good work with the usual suspects. Maybe I'm not taking enough drugs anymore...

One I remember that, even as a young guy long before I ever thought about recording or anything that I heard and though, this would be a cool sound. I was working a construction job and was dragging two pieces of long rebar across a gravel lot. They made the strangest, slithery, humming sound, particularly with two of them creating slightly different pitches. That's one someone make use of if they have access to the bits requied to record that.

But anyway, it's something I should make more of an effort at, and it also is a way to get more real world sounds into your work when you use as many virtual instruments as I do.

[synthoid]

I love the new handheld flash recorders for this kind of stuff. They make it possible to scoop up all kinds of found sounds and use them in recordings. Seems to me like all the cool sampling technology that came around since the time of Rumours and Queen should have led to a lot more of this kind of stuff in music.

Someone told me that an album was made -- by the Massive Attack guys maybe? can't remember -- using sounds that were sampled during a surgery. Can't remember the details ...

-synthoid

[thethrillfactor]

Originally Posted by synthoid

Someone told me that an album was made -- by the Massive Attack guys maybe? can't remember -- using sounds that were sampled during a surgery. Can't remember the details ...

-synthoid

That was Matmos a "Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure".

[Dean Roddey]

Not sure I want to think too much about that, but I'm really squeamish about the stuff inside me staying inside me, and the stuff outside of me staying outside of me.

[synthoid]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

Not sure I want to think too much about that, but I'm really squeamish about the stuff inside me staying inside me, and the stuff outside of me staying outside of me.

Right, I think this works best with someone else's surgery.

-synthoid

[Dean Roddey]

And who was it, the Doobie Brothers?, who did a drum part by the drummer inserting a mic where the lava lamp doesn't shine and drumming on his stomach? I can't remember who it was.