Mic madness part 03 - shaker boxes

Continuing with our spot of rough and ready DIY, we finally got around to making a couple of passive shaker boxes.

Basically all there is to it is a box of some kind, we used a plastic one and a metal one, with a piezo contact mic glued inside. This is then wired to some sort of audio output, we used an RCA (Phono) out put as it's small, simple to fit and we had a few knocking about.

We then covered the Piezo and wiring in glue to give them some protection and filled the boxes up with plastic BB pellets. So armed we then threw the shaker through as many stomp boxes and effects chains as possible.

A really simple little tool to make, a passive shaker box can be a source of lots of odd, ambient or just plain crazy sounds depending on which effects you throw it through. It's also not constricted to just shaking -tap it, scratch it, drop it, shout through it, use it as a mic in front of a guitar amp - it's all good. Of course changing the contents also affects the end result - rice, marbles, fishing shot, use your imagination and all this for around a fiver!

As a taster before FM216 hits the stands there's a few samples (along with some hydrophone stuff) here.

Mic madness part 02 - Thunderwonderverb

After getting wet with the hydrophone we turned our attention to contact mics and a little bit of DIY. As they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing so let me introduce to you..... the Thunderwonderverb.

Pretty hi-tech huh? Basically what we did was take an old speaker (from a home keyboard originally I think) and wire it to a 1/4" jack. This was then clamped and pointed down the sound hole of a spring drum (sometimes called a thunder tube) whose small drum head was miked up with a contact mic.

A spring drum is quite a basic percussion instrument - just a tube with a thin diaphragm/drum head at one end to which a metal spring is attached. As you shake, or tap the tube the spring vibrates, in turn vibrating the drum head making a thunder-like noise.

The blue cable you can see is attached to the 1/4" output of the contact mic that is masking taped to the body of the spring drum to stop it getting in the way.

Okay, we sent a variety of sounds through to the small speaker, which in turn vibrated the drum head and spring which was picked up by the contact mic. This signal was mixed with the original sound and hey presto a strange spring reverb effect.

We wished we had a bigger speaker, as this one was very toppy but the whole thing worked well enough for adding an unusual, cheap-sounding, low-fi, tight reverb effect to whatever we blasted through it. In the end it sounded better on drums so we fed a series of our vintage (and not so vintage) drum boxes through it.

Mic madness part 01 - Hydrophone

Hi all

Just completed a couple of weeks of audio nuttiness for Future Music and thought we'd cover what we'd got up to in a bit of depth here.

First up we grabbed a hydrophone off Ebay -basically a piezo transducer (or contact mic) covered in waterproof liquid rubber, a hydrophone picks up vibrations in liquid rather than in the air (like a normal microphone).

With the blue wonder in hand alongside our trusty M-Audio Microtrack field recorder we headed out into the local countryside to chuck it in the river. Okay, okay, we did flush it down the bog first, as you would. Although this isn't as easy as it might seem as clonking the mic on anything (like white porcelain) causes nasty spikes/clips in the recording - so basically you have to have your hand down there as well....

Anyway back to the great outdoors and after dangling the mic into a slow-moving from a low bridge we hit on the first slight problem - there's not alot going on under the water, so there's not alot going on in the end recording either.

This was soon resolved but heading to the local weir just down the road from GCHQ and dangling it in the fast flowing water. Because of the long cable we could also throw it in and record it going over the weir and into the bubbling current. These more interesting results began a quest for bubbling streams, mini weirs and fast runs of water - resulting in Mr Hoodee standing knee deep in a stream being watched by an interested swan and the whole of the local playgroup out for a walk!

When we'd exhausted all our local rivers and streams we moved on to more experimental mucking about. Like the submerged tambourine in the plastic dustbin of water to the right. Marbles (an old GCHQ standby) were then thrown, dropped and flicked into/onto the bin. There was also a few minutes of utter madness involving an electric whisk which definitely carry a DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS warning.

This was then followed by glasses of tonic (gin-less I'm afraid), splashing about in the bath, the washing up bowl and British summer weather. All good fun!

If you'd like a quick preview of the sort of sample we came up with using the hydrophone head over to here where there is a couple of downloadable tasters.

more pics

Here's a pic of the Gakken when it's put together - hopefully get some sort of video together at some point, I know we say that a lot but we do try...kind of.

And here's a pic of yet another addition to our collection of vintage drum machines. This is a DR-55 which is very similar to our Soundmaster SR88 but the hi-hats are restricted to 8's, 16th's or 12th's, rather than being programmable on the SR-88. This one had the addition of a couple of modds, one for the tuning of the kick and the other for it's decay, which makes this little machine even more interesting.

single strings, dancehall, primary percussion and import duty

Hi all.

Ooops been over a month since our last log, and we were doing so well!

Been a busy few weeks with interesting sample sets for CM and FM. CM wanted sounds of the carnival so we went for some booty shaking dancehall twinned with a load of latin percussion loops. We've a huge box of various percussion here at GCHQ but we surprised to find ourselves without a cowbell and our deadline looming. Mrs Hoodee ended up saving the day with the suggestion of asking our local primary school if they had any percussion we could swipe for an afternoon - the school turned up trumps and supplied us with a selection of pristine cowbells to thump merry hell out of. At least they look used now.

FM was all about bass this month so we fired up the synths and got all low end on their ass (sorry). Just to mix things up a bit and inject the usual GCHQ flavour we had a crack at making and playing a tea chest bass. With no tea chest in sight we used a varity of boxes and bins but found that just a humble cardboard box gave the best results when recorded with a sm57 poked in a roughly cut sound hole.

Apart from being a good giggle, perhaps unsurprisingly our string bass was an absolute bugger to play and pitch without a few weeks (if not months or years) practice. We had around an hour, so ended up running an output from the mixer into a guitar tuner and sampling off as many good. clean pitches as we could before stretching and re-sampling them to make a really warm sounding Kontakt kit. We also have renewed respect to all the skiffle players out there who can play the bloody thing!

In other sample related news, we've just finished a set of drum and percussion loops for the guys at Sample Magic for their Sunset Sessions 2 sample library that should be out in a month or two. really pleased with what we came up with so think the release will be something special.

On the audio toys front we had delivery of a Gakken mini synth-thingie from Japan and a monotonic labs N37 synth pedal-sequenced square wave-whatsit from the states (let us know if we get to technical).

The Gakken is a screw together kit that makes a sort of stylophone-like synth with cut off and is played with a metal probe-like thing on a carbon ribbon. There's no notes laid out like a stylophone but it does make some great sounds and comes in some fab Japanese packaging, complete with a synth mag (in Japanese). These are pretty cheap but be careful as due to some skipping of the small print from the online shop where we got it we got stung for a lump of import duty (although the processing fee from parcel forge ended up more than any duty/vat we had to pay!!) so it turned into a rather expensive bargain. Is great tho.

On the cards this month is a set of nu-gaze samples for CM (don't ask - look it up), a trip to switzerland to see our mate Spoons, if MR Hoodees passport gets back in time (really don't ask) and an interesting set of samples for FM, which we'll blog about later in the month.

broken glass everywhere...

Been a busy week catching up with sample work after our mini break. Set of DnB samples done for the next issue of FM plus it's our turn for the photo shoot. So it's off outside with a laptop, sh101 and our mucka and fab lens-smith Ecki.

Disused railway bridge not far from GCHQ looked grimey enough for an atmos shot, so up went the lights and Mr Hoodee begins to look uncomfortable !-) The shot above and below show the set up for the shoot, will post the actual photo used when we know which one FM used.

The next half an hour or so involved them both sitting or laying amongst the broken glass and dirt, with Mr Hoodee trying to keep his face out of shot. To be honest they make quite an entertaining double act on a shoot and the moaning and insults aside, get the job done quickly - Mr H is turning into quite an experienced model! For bookings just drop us an email..(THATS ENOUGH OF THAT!! - Mr H)

Anyway samples done and turned in, so we thought it'd been a while since we got anything for the studio so we've ordered one of these little beauties from Chimera Synths (also based in East Anglia) - couple of weeks waiting list but we'll shove up a video as soon as we get it.

video naughties

Just finished uploading some videos to you tube. Some have appeared in this blog, a couple never made it.

You can have a butchers here