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Underground > Radio & Music >

General musical gizmos thread..

  
 
rizla mission
15:13 / 11.11.02
Basically, I plan to spend the next few months acquiring as many fun noise-making contraptions as possible for as little money as possible..

I still know very little about such things, but my hypothetical shopping list reads:

a super-fuzz pedal, and any (and I do mean any) other guitar pedals which are going cheap;

a sampler

a £25 kids drumkit from Argos

a decent portable tape recorder

a 4-track recording thingy

a drum machine

any other crazy noisy things that come my way

Pragmatism, cheapness and fun is of a far higher priority than quality here, so does anyone have any abvice on good ways to pick up cheap stuff, good things to do with it once I've got it, things to avoid at all costs etc.

You know how it is when you just wake up in the morning with an uncontrollable urge to make really bad lo-fi electro-goth-psychedelic-noise-space-punk shit..?
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
15:21 / 11.11.02
You know Rizla, it's really too bad we don't live in the same neighborhood. I've got a lot of that stuff, but I'm not using it cos I desperately need a partner on a similar wavelength. And yr in England, you bastard!

If you want to get good cheap pedals, I have one word for you: Danelectro. I highly recommend their pedals.
 
 
Saveloy
15:51 / 11.11.02
If you don't want to do anything too clever with samples, you could look out for a 2nd hand sampling keyboard. I saw one - a tiny thing - in a charity shop the other day going for a fiver (I had no money and was gutted to see an elderly hippy pick it up, rub his beard at it and take it to the counter). If you do want to do clever things, it might be cheaper to sort your PC out for sound than it would be to get an actual sampler. Get the right software and you can make your guitar go "BELB!" or "VANTOSSS!" I've listed the basics in my reply to Rothkoid's question in the random Q & A thread in the Conversation.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:59 / 11.11.02
Pound shops. Full of cheap and tacky noisemaking things for feeding into sampler/PC. And if you fiddle with the circuits a bit, you can 'detune' them/make them make all sorts of odd noises. Much fun.

Gah - saw an ancient Casio in a Mind shop today for £7... want me to see if it's still there?
 
 
The Strobe
17:14 / 11.11.02
Software.

You can't fault pedals, or Speak and Spells, or toy drumkits. But when you say "sampler"... you really can do an awful lot of fun noisemaking stuff for next to no outlay on your pc. Or do you explicitly want little fun boxes to have fun with?

Also: google for circuit bending, or Reed Ghazala. His instruments (modified talking toys) are quite remarkable.
 
 
The Strobe
17:17 / 11.11.02
Similarly, a PC will give you way more tracks and effects for way less money than any four-track.
 
 
Locust No longer
21:53 / 11.11.02
It's funny Rizla because I generally have the same shopping list that you have. I got my hands on a pretty good 4 track not long ago and am looking for a nice sampler. You should definitely check out Keiji Haino's solo disk of guitar noise on Forced Exposure records. It'll inspire you.
 
 
Saveloy
08:56 / 12.11.02
Paleface:

"Similarly, a PC will give you way more tracks and effects for way less money than any four-track"

For mucking about with live instruments, I'd go for a physical 4-track myself (I managed to get a 2nd-hand one for 40 quid), but that's probably just because it's what I'm used to, and my experience of the virtual sort is tiny. I like the portability of a 4-track, the user-friendliness and the immediacy. You can leave it permanently set up with a microphone plugged in and be recording in seconds. And buggering about with the speed as you record is fun.

As I said, I've not played with the software version much. What multi-track software would you recommend, Paleface?
 
 
The Strobe
10:05 / 12.11.02
Hmn. I too am a hardware monkey, but I've seen enough of software to begin to be convinced. Maybe my original suggestion wasn't great - I mean, yes, for stuff like Riz wants to do, the immediacy of a tape four-track can't be beaten.

But for instance: Cubasis can be found for around £60 if my local PC World serves me right. It can do clever things, but you can use it really simply as an eight-track, and it should IIRC run VST effects and stuff. So you can record your dodgy toy drum kit, and then whack it through FrOHMage (probably the greatest cheesy fucked up filter in the world). Similarly, N-Track studio is basically a four-track in your PC. The free version will only do effects on one track, but I didn't think it was much to register... ah yeah. 42 euros. And, of course, it has N tracks, not 4. Finally, much as I hate the mag, Computer Music's new cover disc is ridiculously great. It now comes free with free VST sampler, drum sampler, and analogue synth, and an exclusive version of Muzys, a midi/audio sequencer. Muzys is a little unusual, but works in a clever loop-based way, can use any VST effects and instruments (of which you can download loads of free ones - though it's limited to five instruments in the synth rack, and of course by processor). The CD also has some other good free instruments and effects on it. And other demos. And you could make music entirely from this CD with nothing else, if you were so inclined, bar the bird-noise samples and toy instruments...

Also: the kind of plugins that do fucked-up-shit are more likely to be free than ones going for sonic accuracy. Ohmforce make some very cool retro noisemanglers; only the filter's free, but it's FANTASTIC. You can tell their outlook from the design of the site.

That's an idea, then. Maybe consider the computer not necessarily for recording, but for further noisemangling. I don't use software because my studio's mainly hardware, and I haven't had a need to multitrack yet (I just use sampler - that will change when it comes to vocals). But I do use Soundforge for samplemangling etc. If you can find an old Tascam four track for forty quid, I think that'd be a good move for Riz - but you can also find lots of fun stuff for free that'll make dumb noise on your PC, and it might be worth four-tracking that too. My free mouse-driven Theremin is wonderful fun .
 
 
Saveloy
13:53 / 12.11.02
Paleface> Mmmm, theremin *drool*. Thanks for the tips, that N-Tracker sounds good. Agree about the "further noisemangling", too. Btw, have you got any tracks online we could have a listen to?

Rizla> While you're down the charity shop looking for instruments, have a look through their records for obscure or unusual stuff to sample, once you get your PC sorted out. There's always at least one sound effects / 'German Cock-Banjo' / Hi-Fi test record in amongst the Jim Reeves. (Totally off subject but I was chuffed to find 'Journey into Stereo Sound' the other day, which features the original jolly-but-authoritative posh bloke going "This is a journey into sound" etc, as sampled by everyone in 1987).
 
 
The Strobe
13:56 / 12.11.02
Saveloy: yes, some, but low-fi; am uploading hi-fi stuff soonish, but keeping it hidden; will post a link when done.

Unfortunately, you won't be very impressed, it basically falling into the genre downbeat/fearful-chillout/music-for-documentaries-and-adverts. But I finished a 10-track demo cd (well, 9-track and FutureLoopFoundation remix track) this summer. Which was satisfying. But I can't wait to move on with all the fun ideas I've had.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:39 / 12.11.02
Sav is right about charity shops, you'll often find bizarro sound effects albums, and anything that's called something like 'Hi-Fi Companion' is likely to have some great sampling material. Friend of mine found a BBC sound effects album from the 70s in an Oxfam a couple of weeks ago for £2!!
 
 
grant
19:25 / 12.11.02
I'd say a decent mike, a cheap amp, and some recording gizmos for the computer.

And get yourself some Tape Op. They've had me up late the last couple nights turning a thrift store telephone into a microphone.
It would have taken a couple hours, but I'm trying to get rid of this annoying buzz (grounding issues due to bad connections, I think).

The main advantage to owning a 4 track over a computer isn't the immediacy - I've got a PC at home with a mixer plugged into the sound card all the time, just turn everything on and go - but the physical things you can do with tape. If you want to experiment with fucked up sounds, make sure your 4 track (if you go that way) has a *variable speed knob*. If you slow down crunchy guitar just a little, you can get some really scary walls of sound.
Oh, and remember that if you're not overdriving (using the gains to make distortion), a guitar plugged straight into a 4 track tends to sound tinny and nasal all at once. Not good. Better to mike the amp.

Distortion pedals are an obvious choice, but if you can get your amp to distort, they're really not necessary. You can get much more interesting sounds from delay pedals and vibrato/tremolo/flangers. Especially if they have a "volume" or "drive" or "level" knob - that means that they can pre-amp the signal, boosting the volume *before* it reaches the amp, which introduces a whole new world of overdrive fun. Sometimes "level" will refer to the amount of effect, not the volume, so see if you can play around with the pedal before buying. Some flanged feedback sounds like toy birds.

One of my favorite noisemaking things (done at friends, because I don't have the key ingredient) is to detune the fat E string until it's almost as low as it can go without clattering around, then playing through a wah-wah pedal. Sounds like a digeridoo, sort of.
 
 
Saveloy
09:57 / 13.11.02
Toys: Has anyone tried one of them kiddies' megaphone things which is supposed to transmogrify your voice? I've always been too embarrassed to try it out in the shop.

4-tracks: Pitch control is also handy for tuning a pre-recorded track to an un-tunable instrument like a keyboard.

Another extremely useful thing is 0-RETURN, for automatically taking you back to wherever you set the tape counter to zero. Will save you hours, especially if you're the sort to leave something rewinding, forget it, find it's gone all the way back to the start of the tape, fast-forward, forget it, find it's gone all the way to the end of the tape, and so on, for ever and ever.

I'll 2nd what grant says about gain, too. Good for beefing anything up, including drum-machines and keyboards. Apparently that Bernard Butler from Suede used to use a Fostex 4-track instead of a distortion pedal.

Does anyone have any experience of digital multi-tracks (the hardware version)? I've heard you can buy new ones for 100 quid nowadays.

grant:

"The main advantage to owning a 4 track over a computer isn't the immediacy - I've got a PC at home with a mixer plugged into the sound card all the time, just turn everything on and go"

Ah, you must have one of them modern electrified computers. Mine is 8 thousand years old and consists of an ape pushing a bunch of ants around a sand tray with a pointed stick. He won't lift a finger till I've hoovered the nits off him. Damned dirty ape!
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
10:45 / 13.11.02
I do hope you're not being ape-ist there, Sav.

Toys: Has anyone tried one of them kiddies' megaphone things which is supposed to transmogrify your voice? I've always been too embarrassed to try it out in the shop

Not a techy person at all really, but I have messed about with these... good fun, and fun for feeding other instruments into ... had fun strapping one to my violin, (like a huge Fisher-Price pick-up!) and playing into it...

(anyway, ain't you a daddy? perfect excuse to go mess about in toyshops/the early learning centre is somewhere I recommend for noisy things as well.)
 
 
Saveloy
14:08 / 13.11.02
BiP:
"Not a techy person at all really, but I have messed about with these... good fun, and fun for feeding other instruments into ... had fun strapping one to my violin, (like a huge Fisher-Price pick-up!) and playing into it..."

That sounds facking brilliant. Why don't we see people doing this on TOTP? I might have to convince my son he really wants one.

"(anyway, ain't you a daddy? perfect excuse to go mess about in toyshops/the early learning centre is somewhere I recommend for noisy things as well.)"

Ah, having kids just allows you to walk round the shop without everyone thinking you're a prevert. If you handle the toys you still have to make it look as if you're sizing them up for strength and durability ("yes, this will kill many rabbits") and nothing else. If I had any brains I'd get the nipper to try it out for me, which is what I'll do next time we see one.
 
 
grant
14:26 / 13.11.02
Does anyone have any experience of digital multi-tracks (the hardware version)? I've heard you can buy new ones for 100 quid nowadays.



A friend of mine at work got one (obscure namedropping: Bob Lind, 60s rockstar) - it's his first foray into home recording, and he's thrilled with it. The discs he's made that I've heard sound pretty good. I don't think you have the maneuverability a computer gives you, but you also don't crash and get software conflicts and stuff.
 
 
rizla mission
15:07 / 13.11.02
Thanks for the advice all..

For some reason I have a real ludist instinct to avoid using computers.. d'know why, I've just always found mixing computers and sounds (even when it works) to be an impractical and frustrating process, whereas I've got this strange notion that using half-broken obselete equipment would be a lot more fun..

And if you fiddle with the circuits a bit, you can 'detune' them/make them make all sorts of odd noises. Much fun.

That in particular sounds like LOADs of fun! Will start taking the screwdriver to toy keyboards as soon as possible..

Toys: Has anyone tried one of them kiddies' megaphone things which is supposed to transmogrify your voice? I've always been too embarrassed to try it out in the shop.

I've seen numerous bands (Erase Errata, Kaito and Urusei Yatsura spring to mind) use them on stage to great effect..

I seem to remember on a previous thread (I've forgotten which one), people were recommending the merits of a website dedicated to musical equipment related small ads. Which sounds like just the ticket.. anyone want to remind me where it can be found?
 
 
grant
17:29 / 13.11.02
Damn - there was a site listed on memepool a year or so ago, some guy coming up with hardware hacks and cracks, turning Speak-n-Spells and other sound-making toys into electronic instruments by playing with the circuitry.

And Riz - I find computers easier to use. Not the MIDI stuff, that's all freaky to me. But the programs like Acid where you just take an audio file and manipulate and mix it - just like a 4-track, only easier to move around inside.
 
 
The Strobe
17:58 / 13.11.02
grant: That's Reed Ghazala, who I mentioned earlier, and is worth a google for. His site on "circuit-bending" is very informative - it's not just poking around with tools, there IS a kind of logic to it, and it helps you find out what's going to work. (I love people reading previous posts in a thread).

Sound on Sound Reader Ads are probably the best UK resource of second hand stuff. I haven't heard of a digital multitrack for, let's see... Zoom do a digital four-track, which records onto Smartmedia, and has some built-in effects, for £190. And that's a supa-cheap budget one. Most "budget" digital multitrackers hover around £500, plus or minus 100 - but bear in mind they do have some (unmangly) built in effects and all have various other features that might come in handy.

And whilst you might not want to use PCs, there are awful lot of weird and wonderful noisemaking thingies that you couldn't conceive of doing in hardware for the price you can do on a pc. Triangle II is one of the best virtual analogue's I've seen, and it's... free. In hardware, it'd set you back a fair bit.
 
 
grant
19:53 / 13.11.02
grant: That's Reed Ghazala, who I mentioned earlier, and is worth a google for. His site on "circuit-bending" is very informative - it's not just poking around with tools, there IS a kind of logic to it, and it helps you find out what's going to work. (I love people reading previous posts in a thread).


I missed that reference, but yeah, that's the guy.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
22:42 / 13.11.02
That in particular sounds like LOADs of fun! Will start taking the screwdriver to toy keyboards as soon as possible..

Works on all sorts of other things as well as keyboards. LikeIsay, pound shops are stuffed with talking/ noise-making cheapo electronic toys, that are great fun to dissect and short/'detune' - try talking/chirping animals...
 
 
at the scarwash
22:56 / 13.11.02
My favorite PC-based recording software is CoolEdit Pro. It's cheap, intuitive, and fairly useful. Not as flash as Nuendo or Cubase, but solid. In conjunction with fruityloops and a decent soundcard, it does the job in a fairly competent manner. A cassette 4-track is nice, but the limitations can get a little old. I think we spent 600 dollars on the basic hardware for our set up.
 
 
bpm77
00:01 / 14.11.02
step one: download kazaa
step two: off of kazaa, download Acid Pro
step three: now download FruitLoops
step four: ditch kazaa
Plug, play.
 
 
rizla mission
09:29 / 14.11.02
So... I'm thinking, I'm probably missing something here, but presumably, to record noises onto computer, some kind of midi-esque hardware is needed.. unless one was to use a cheapo computer microphone, which I'd imagine would be completely unbearable..
 
 
Saveloy
10:27 / 14.11.02
Nope, all you need is a sound card. And you need a sound card with at least three sockets:

Line in (for recording off your hi-fi, 4-track etc

Line-out (for sending the noises out of your PC back into your hi-fi, so you can hear them (via your ear(s))

Mic (for recording off a micromophone)

On all the ones I've seen, these sockets are the little jack plug sort as used by walkman headphones. You'll also need cables with one of them at one end and two phono plugs (left and right) at the other. You can sometimes get them from Dixons, Curries etc, but they'll cost 8 billion quid per foot. Better to look in Maplins. Also look out for any and every cable adapter you can get your hands on (say, guitar lead jack plug-to-tiny headphone plug).
 
 
C.Elseware
12:26 / 14.11.02
Computers are all very well. But I hate a "live" band who use a computer. You might as well get a goddam minidisk player which doesn't crash so often.

Instruments I've used live: theramin, furby, many kids keyboards, phrase samplers (good for rythm samples), minidisk player (good for long samples), a bit of meat (it conducts electricity!), toy electronic drums, misc. kids toys, loadsa toy ray-guns, a pikachu mouse organ (don't ask), pedals, fx units, drum machines and old laboratory signal generators.

See our site for some more examples and pictures.

My experience of kids toys is that the don't usually come with a jack socket, and the speaker is usually too high a level to go into a mixer (it overloads and sounds crap) so it's worth investing in a bag of cheap resistors. Basically you cut off the speaker and attach a big and a small resistor in serial instead. then you attach a quarter-inch jack socket to the toy and wire either side of that to either side of the smaller resistor. This significantly lowers the voltage. I forget the exact numbers but I think 10 and 10000 (10K) worked.



Also this stuff *will* break at critical times so always buy 2 or 3 if you see something cheap you like, and have a backup plan for a performance.

If anyone in the Southampton area wants any kids keyboards or stuff I've got loads spare, but collecting 'em is your problem.
 
 
The Strobe
12:41 / 14.11.02
Other fun things to do with your guitar, Riz, because I've only just discovered this:

alternate tunings. Forget the chords you know. Work out new ones. I've been playing quite a bit the past two days in DADGAD and DADGBD and loving every second of it - they lend themselves to suspensions and stuff, and have this peculiar "slack" sound. Makes you think differently anyway, but I'm not sure how confident you are in "normal" tuning yet.

You don't need anything with the word "MIDI" near it if all you're doing is recording sound. Just, as Saveloy says, leads and a line-in socket.
 
 
rizla mission
13:32 / 14.11.02
OK! Right..

Can anyone give me a reason why I shouldn't buy this?;

Boss ME-5 guitar effects box, distortion, overdrive, chorus, flanger, eq, compressor, digital delay & reverb, 64 patches, MIDI in/out, good condition.

From the Sound on Sound ads. It's pretty cheap and sounds fun.
But the cheapness makes me think there's a catch.

Oh, and;

a bit of meat (it conducts electricity!),

Respect is due!
 
 
Bear
13:57 / 14.11.02
I can give you some PC software is you want, Cubase is the name but it looks for too complicated to me but if you want you can have a copy?
 
 
at the scarwash
18:05 / 14.11.02
That effects processor sounds fun, and if it's usefully cheap, I'd say go for it. I'm all about shit digital effects. Don't buy it over say, something to record on or a decent microphone, but if it's cheap, yeah. Boss effects beg overkill; just one sounds weak, but layer a flanger, distorition, digital reverb on top of a signal coming from a child's toy accordion mic'ed in a steel trashcan, and you have a winner.
 
  
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