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Strange Eons - putting the home-made into home recording
So this track is a bit of a departure for me, in that it involves an actual instrument being played, ahem, ‘live’. Not only that, but it’s an instrument I made myself.
This is it:
It’s an electric ‘diddly bow’, basically a fret less one string electric guitar played slide style, made out of a bit of left over doorframe, a £10 pre wired pickup off eBay, a bass machine head, a couple of bolts and a plastic box. I called it The Spirit Level because a) it looks like one b) making it raised my spirits and c) it raises Spirits whenever I convene a seance upon it. Hardware fx are a Mooer PE100 multi fx, bargain price excellent little unit, and a Korg NTS-1 being used for Even More Reverb ™️.
I already made one track using it, this one:
But that felt like a bit of a cheat, because you’d be hard pushed to hear anything guitar-y on it (I used the Ableton pitch to midi facility to turn what I played into what became the choir here.)
So for this second go, I majored on the actual guitar slidey stuff, which wasn’t easy because I can’t play guitar. Still and all, I’m reasonably happy at how it turned out.
This isn’t my usual thing at all - for a start, it has vocals (courtesy, primarily, of a manipulated brief extract from 'The Nameless City' from The Collected Public Domain Works of H.P. Lovecraft, as read by Scott Carpenter, available free via the Librivox App: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/librivox-audio-books/id596159212 ; a text to speech app called Talker https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/talker-text-to-speech/id956310491; and the Voice Synth https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/voice-synth/id490511069 vocoder), and (gasp) even drums. (Normally a doomy bass thud and some random skittering from Skiid or Fractal Beats is my limit.)
I also used my Launchpad and Ableton to arrange the finished IPad sourced stems, as a proof on concept/teach myself how to use Ableton kind of thing. So, new things on all fronts. So I’m not calling this one dark ambient, but Witch House.
I like to think that old H.P., who knew a thing or two about such houses, might have approved:
Comments
Epic sounds abound here... i'd love to see it played even for a few seconds to correlate the sounds to the real world.
This is fantastic stuff...nice job. I too would like to see the diddly bow in action!
I like it. Iä!
(And +1 on seeing a video of the Spirit Level in action.)
Awesome tracks! Loved this instrument. Have been searching for cheap-ish pickups for some experiments here too
Hope you'll delve into other sound experiments and share with us later
It's cool too that even though you are trying things out of your confort zone, you don't loose your identity
Excellent! As always I learn from you!
Here’s an electric diddly bow with 3 pairs of pickups made from old wall warts, magnets, and a guitar machine gear. It has a series of switches to do parallel or serial sound chain as well as being able to turn off some of the pickups. The audio input signal from the diddley bow is going into the headphone jack using a passive circuit with a pot to set the input level to eliminate noise housed in an Altoid tin (no usb or other audio interface was used).
What a cool design. Thanks for the visual dimension this time. I appreciate the extra effort to
give us more insight to your creation and technical solutions.
@Paulinko : wow, that’s brilliant, you actually made your own pickups too? - that’s hardcore! Sounds fantastic, looks brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve seen some interesting experiments where a guy has set up pendulum pickups swinging over static strings, kind of like an auto e-bow, can’t find the link at the moment, and of course there’s always Steve Reich’s great Pendulum Music (his quote: ‘If it’s done right, it’s kind of funny.’
) - 
And this:
If I won the lottery, mind, I’d get one of these for sure - an electro mechanical synth!:
@JustJill, @McD, @celtic_elk, @barabajagal : thanks all for the listens.
I’ll give some thought to maybe a quick video clip, but my, um ‘method’ is very much sausage factory stuff - you really don’t want to see how the sausage is made!
With this experiment it just involved setting a drum beat running to give me something to keep time too, and then just doing what you see @Paulinko doing , in my case using finger plucks, a glass and a plastic slide to whale on the string whilst running the Spirit Level through lots of distortion and reverb. I listened back to what was about a twenty minute jam, and found one or two fragments that sounded cool, and snipped them out into loops.
The best thing was that because it was all so cheap and home made (even the guitar string was old remaindered stock I got for pennies off eBay) that I didn’t feel bad about slamming and abusing the string and pickup in ways I wouldn’t want to try on the actual guitar I have that I am currently attempting to learn to play.
I have more experiments planned. Quite interested in what the cheapest ‘alternative ebow’ might do for the Spirit Level, for example: https://www.gear4music.com/Guitar-and-Bass/TC-Electronic-AEON-Infinite-Sustainer/2G6K. I’ll keep you posted!
I think you're getting sounds that don't sound "synthesized" and that always interesting.
As for the sausage comment... I think your creativity is a form of problem solving that works in that space between craft and art: it's an extension of the individual.
These types of posts generate ripples of imitation on this forum... it's another way to craft a unique vision.
@McD : ‘problem solving’ - thank you, yes, I like that.
it is what my ‘experiments’ often feel like.
It's Science! Human knowledge applied to manage reality more effectively.
@Svetlovska thank you, I get fairly excited about being able to create cool things from materials that would otherwise be discarded (e.g. pickups from all of those extra wall warts you don’t remember what they powered). I was intrigued by the historical origins of the Diddley bow and decided it might be a good idea to electrify it. I learned how to solder and delved into how circuits work. Here’s a video of a SparkPunk synth being used with a Micro Freak CV controls and several light controlled resistors that I recently tried out:
Very inspiring @Svetlovska. I am going to now sonically experiment using our whippet Manson, a full bathtub and a hair dryer. Remember, it’s your doing!
@Paulinko : very cool! I’ll have to check out Sparkpunk synth.
These have been on my wish list forever, waiting for enough spare cash to spring for them:
https://koma-elektronik.com/?product=field-kit-field-kit-fx-expansion-packs-bundle.
@LinearLineman : poor Manson! Oh, the humanity! (caninity?)
Naw, get a real bow! You can find Chinese junkers for pennies on eBay. They’re terrible but they’ll be fine to play a diddly. They’ll excite so many other objects as well. Everyone should have one.
Then you can make one of these:
@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr : I actually do have a cheap bow, purchased for that very purpose. Only thing is, I seem to have lost it moving my studio from the back room to the attic... Excellent link vid though. I already had some links to Daxophones:
but you better believe I am tracking down that cd rom...