Crazy Recording Techniques

[Sandyrb]

Okay folks... as discussed in another thread, give us your wildest and scariest ideas for getting sounds. Use your imagination; anything goes, no wrong answers. I think we could all learn some stuff and perhaps have a laugh doing it.

Some of my own eclectic moments to start you off:
1) I sometimes plant a mic in a cupboard in the live room to get that "down the hall" sound on the drums.
2) I sometimes cram a mic into each end of an industrial size vacuum cleaner tube for a weird stereo room tone.
3) I have a metal CD stand which I've often used as a reverb.
4) Once we forced an Audio Technica Pro37-R into the neck of a Culligan water bottle and hung it in front of an amp to deliberately make it sound cheap and crappy.
5) We once constructed a raised floor with a C617 underneath it and a couple of e22s above so we could capture the sound of a guy doing this ethnic Ukrainian dancing thing.
6) I taped two C451s to a rain tube to get some crazy stereo.

So what else have you guys done or would like to try? Don't hold back. :)

Cheers,

[Dan]

I put a contact mic on a railroad track. The result was useless, but I'm glad I tried it.

-Dan.

[Ryan Kelly]

SM57 underneath a yamaha 9' grand

naiant mics plugged into the mic panels at random spots of the room

micing the glass in front of a singer instead of the vocalist

[pauly]

hopefully i can write this without total confusion.

i plugged my melody maker guitar into a pigtronix echolution stereo delay pedal into my 20 watt jmp marshall facing my 50 watt orange thunderverb about 6 feet away from each other. i set up 2 royer 121's blumlein dead center between the cabs so that not the front or back of the 121's were directed at either cab. recorded then panned hard left and right. it kind of sucked until i remembered to flip my phase. the stereo image wasn't just super wide it was like surround sound with two speakers. the part was very minimal, the whole setup is really just an effect.

not the crazziest thing but it was the first thing to come to my head.

[Ken Morgan]

- fiddle DI via Barcus Berry thru a wah pedal - eerie but very cool
- 57 on top of the building to an cassette recorder to capture night sounds...
- taped a wireless mic to a slow moving ceiling fan to capture a group of people setting in a circle picking acoustics and singing...weird but cool effect.

[Zachg]

well I've used a shure pg57 to mic a snare once... not crazy, but it sounded bad :p

Are there any sound samples of the Culligan water bottle/ mic combo, that might be cool!

[Mixwell]

Oh Man,

I bet the Shadow has some content he could add to this thread,

Magic.

[Jeremy Krull]

did some sound effect creation for a post production project back when I was in B*rklee...

we did some cool stuff, such as:

1. fastening a Shure Beta 98 to a large metal counterweight and slowly pushing it across the tiled floor of a liveroom and then looping a long stretch of that as part of an engine idle noise for a space ship.

2. repeatedly spiking tomatoes on my kitchen floor for punching noises and capturing it with a Rode NT5

3. repeatedly snapping celery to imitate a knuckle crack.

4. Stole a road sign and repeatedly hit it with a piece of a mic stand to simulate metal on metal contact during a fight scene.

I'm sure as I track more music I'll have more weird recording technique stories as well...

[Tomasz]

While recording drums in a big basement, I have placed a mic just outside the laundry chute in the upstairs bathroom.I found this spot accidentally while taking a break and the drummer was rehearsing.. HUGE drum sound especially after multing and crushing the hell out of it.....
I've also Reamped vox through an amp and recorded that with a distantly placed omni mic... in a medium room

[Dan]

- taped a wireless mic to a slow moving ceiling fan to capture a group of people setting in a circle picking acoustics and singing...weird but cool effect.

Tucking that one away for later... I've heard of swinging a 57 around by the cable, but never thought of using a wireless.

-Dan.

[seaneldon]

but never thought of using a wireless.

Live Guy Evilness.

I frequently tape the most hi-res mic in the building (Josephson C617 w/ Gefell MK221 capsule) to the most lo-res mic in the building (Seancraphone) with the elements aligned. Makes for some interesting effects with frequency response, distortion, and polar pattern. Creates a beautiful yet trashy room mic.

[Jeremy Krull]

haha dare I ask what the Seancraphone is?

any of you guys ever use a CB radio handset as a room mic btw? I did that once it was pretty cool.

[Sandyrb]

Any of you guys ever use a CB radio handset as a room mic?

Yeah, actually I have an Astatic D104 (or 102, can't remember) for that very purpose. The transmit key locks so I don't have to sit there holding it. :)

It sounds... strange, but in a kinda wonderful way.

Cheers,

[Jeremy Krull]

Yeah, actually I have an Astatic D104 (or 102, can't remember) for that very purpose. The transmit key locks so I don't have to sit there holding it. :)

It sounds... strange, but in a kinda wonderful way.

Cheers,

ha yea, the one we had we had to gaff the key down, but it worked nicely.

[jimmy jones]

i once got a kid to walk down the street to sing into a pay phone. i held my phone up to the monitors while i mic'd another with a 57 in the live room. it turned out pretty cool... i thought. it was like minus 30 outside at the time and apparently there was some old dude waiting to use the phone while he was singing some screamo part into the phone. i wish i had a video.

[Dan]

i once got a kid to walk down the street to sing into a pay phone. i held my phone up to the monitors while i mic'd another with a 57 in the live room. it turned out pretty cool... i thought. it was like minus 30 outside at the time and apparently there was some old dude waiting to use the phone while he was singing some screamo part into the phone. i wish i had a video.

Our tech, Joe, built a DI box that plugs into a telephone handset.

-Dan.

[the shadow]

I'll spill the beans on the Audio Taliban extra special kick drum method. Zing Recording in Westfield, Mass has an upright bass with a sheet metal body. I laid it down in front of a kick drum and stuck a Senheiser condenser in the f hole and compressed the crap out of it with a dbx 160 or 165(can't remember which). It was like an analog 808. We recently tried using a cello between two drum kits here at the meth lab and it was cool but not quite as magical as that sheet metal upright.
I also have used the mic in a water bottle trick but next to a drum kit. A mic in a piece of pvc pipe isn't bad either. Different lengths will get different pitches, so you could actually match the pipe to the key of the song.
Another cool drum sound I got was with a washboard that I attached a piezo to. I laid it on the floor next to the floor tom. It sounded good mixed with the normal drum mics.

[Jeremy Krull]

I'm still working on how cool it is that an upright bass with a sheet metal body exists....I definitely have to try more recording with resonator type setups.

[Sandyrb]

...upright bass with a sheet metal body. I laid it down in front of a kick drum and stuck a Senheiser condenser in the f hole and compressed the crap out of it with a dbx 160 or 165

Actually I've done a similar kinda thing but with a metal dustbin. I find that if the central axis of the bin is pointing to the kick you get some weird sympathetic resonance which is kinda cool. Of course it means there's no direct line-of-sight (or sound haha) between the kit and the mic and that can be useful in itself.

Also in a smaller studio I used to hang a mic in the dustbin but place it behind the drummer, crushed to death with an 1176. That got a pretty nice / filthy ambient tone.

One thing I've always wanted to try is to put a tiny little mic through the air hole in a snare drum. I don't suppose it would sound cool enough to use as a main drum sound and I've always been worried about buggering up the mic but I keep coming back to that idea for some reason. Maybe one day. :)

Cheers,

[Mixwell]

I've seen a freind engineer use a 3-5 ft long PVC tube with his drum mikes.

He aims it up towards the sky with the butt of the tube in between the toms and kick.

Then he sticks a mike at the end.

I made a tube out of aluminum, strapped it to our ceiling, put a speaker at one end, and a crappy mike at the other.

I could keep going, but the Shadow has archives that would make us all look like amateur noise makers.

[Ryan Slowey]

2 fun drum techniques that I learned recently @ a drum recording workshop in NYC:

Take 2 fig. 8 mics (121's in this case), and place them between the fl. tom and kick, and snare and kick respectively, with the nulls facing the kit. IIRC, they were about 3' away. With a touch of compression, it resulted in a huge, roomy sound, considering the close proximity to the kit. We didn't get into it, but I have a feeling that adding a few ms of delay would really open things up, especially if you're tracking in a small(er) room.

Another fun trick we tried, was placing a random dynamic mic on the floor, btwn. the fl. tom and kick, and just compressing the living crap out of it. Fun for adding some lo-fi pumping to your drum sound.


p.s. This is my first post here, so "hello" to everyone. This is a fun forum.

[level devil]

MD421 on a Yamaha Grand into a Thomann/Harley Benton 1x8 tube amp cranked up miked with a R121...

Beta52 on hihat, bad and not my idea ;)

[Benny Grotto]

I've got this crazy idea to turn a radiator into an ambience box; inspired by the pinging that woke me up today as my radiator turned itself on. Sounded just like a snare drum in an auditorium.

Little speaker on one end, some kinda pickup or mic on the other, and off we go.

[Sultan of Swing]

My studio is in the basement of my house, and the sump pump is in my live room. Once, for a children's recording we needed the sound of a washing machine, so I dumped a bucket of water into the sump well. It worked great! Another time a client brought two walkie talkies in and sang into one while holding the other, which resulted in a feedback laden sound. Very effective for the track we were working on.
This is a fun thread!

[Sandyrb]

I just remembered another one...

When I was a kid, we put a speaker into an old electric fire, the type with long coils of resistive wire to generate the heat. Then we bounced a track through this speaker at double speed and stuck a mic on the other side of the room. So there was this weird, crazy reverb tone when played back at regular speed.

I remember being a lot more experimentational than I am these days. Perhaps I need a second childhood. :)

[Sandyrb]

Okay guys I gotta share this with you... and it kinda fits in with the thread. I nearly pi**ed myself laughing.

http://www.movethemics.com/forum/picture.php?albumid=5&pictureid=7

Here you can see the big vacuum cleaner tube that I talked about before hung up in the corner of the room with an M201 stuffed up it. Sounds great; gives a real good, dark but not muddy room tone and adds a lot of oomph to the kick. I love stuff like this. That's Clint, the band's drummer, in the foreground.

So anyway, a couple of the members of the band show up today with their dad who seems to be something of an old school musician and a pretty great guy. I'm showing them how we've got the kit set up so I pointed to the vaccum cleaner tube and said "what do you think of this?"

"A tube mic!" says the old geezer, "Tube mics sound great!" :eek: :D :p ;)

Cheers,

[Dan]

You guys ever seen a Waterphone?
http://www.tonehammer.com/?p=1564

-Dan.

[ears2thesky]

A session I did many years ago I put a Radio Shack PZM in a cardboard box played with a kick drum pedal and a 57 on a rolled up newspaper gaffed to a milk crate played with a drum stick in an effort to get different kick/snare sounds. It worked. It was different.
Actually it worked out pretty well once the tracks were squashed into oblivion and used as the FX send tracks.

[Zachg]

A cool thing I (amd Sandy) learnt today was using MS micing on distorted guitar. Using the Josephson C720 (both capsules), and then some processing (Waves S-1 and a Digi TimeAdjustor) we got one of the hugest single guitar tracks I've ever heard. It's very rare to see two AE's get as excited as we were over a guitar sound as we were... hahaha :)


Paging Sandy!

Can you post the file of the sound we got? ANd hopefully explain what we did a little better?

Zach

[cookseyeng]

One thing I just learned was how to mic guitar and bass cabs with pink noise. Stick your thumb on the end of the tip of the guitar cable while its plugged into the head while its on, and move the mics around until you think you hear the strongest signal through the mixer, thanks to the old dude cover band, that trick is going to come in handy.

[Dan]

One thing I just learned was how to mic guitar and bass cabs with pink noise. Stick your thumb on the end of the tip of the guitar cable while its plugged into the head while its on, and move the mics around until you think you hear the strongest signal through the mixer, thanks to the old dude cover band, that trick is going to come in handy.

While I also learned the pink noise trick, what you're using is not pink noise - it's more of a 60Hz ground hum. Pink noise sounds like tv static (white noise) with less high end. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

Real pink noise is good for this not just because it's steady and you can get "the strongest signal," but because it's got a broad frequency spectrum and you can hear how the changes in mic position are affecting the frequency response.

-Dan.

[cookseyeng]

OHHH haha my bad. I should try it the right way then some time then. I think adobe has a noise generator in it somewhere.

[Mixwell]

Jecklin Door

[seaneldon]

To expand on Adam's incredibly detailed post...

The door is just some extra door we had lying around for whatever reason. LoResHiResPiRes mounted some mic brackets/goosenecks in place of the door handles and VOILA! Two Sony C38B's, one on either side of the door which is placed a few-five feet in front of the drums.

The front-of-the-door mic is 100% direct, the back-of-the-door mic is 100% ambient.

Mix to taste depending on song and application.

I'll record a snippet of drums tonight and put up both files...you can do a lot of cool stuff with this!

We have not yet used the door as a faker-Jecklin disc, though I suppose we can try that tonight as well depending on how much beer is in the fridge.

[moose]

Green Bullet into a Sansamp tossed under the drum kit... sometimes substituted for a 57 or whatever old dynamic mic into a Sansamp... usually just line in to tape.

For the metal bands I've used piezo drum triggers that weren't actually triggering anything... just for the impact.

Lo-Fi vocals into a little battery powered amp, like a 58 into a Smokey which has a "real" mic on it. That's pretty cool...

Take a 441 or whatever near the drums (center of the kit) & jam it into a little guitar amp like a Champ or a Supro/Silvertone... leave it in the room & face it at the drums so the room mics get it.

In a large room I'll often use a shotgun mic... get it as far from the drums or source (guitar?) as possible and aim it directly at the source... that's fun stuff.

Tuned acoustic reverb... take a guitar or dobro (piano can work too) and put it in an open tuning... stick a speaker near it off an aux send & record the strings resonating.

Bass through guitar amps... vocals through guitar amps... I'll shove anything through a Leslie cab... a lot of experiments start with crappy mics & stompboxes.

[Joao Brandao]

To expand on Adam's incredibly detailed post...

The door is just some extra door we had lying around for whatever reason. LoResHiResPiRes mounted some mic brackets/goosenecks in place of the door handles and VOILA! Two Sony C38B's, one on either side of the door which is placed a few-five feet in front of the drums.

The front-of-the-door mic is 100% direct, the back-of-the-door mic is 100% ambient.

Mix to taste depending on song and application.

I'll record a snippet of drums tonight and put up both files...you can do a lot of cool stuff with this!

We have not yet used the door as a faker-Jecklin disc, though I suppose we can try that tonight as well depending on how much beer is in the fridge.


This door looks sweet!

Looking forward to hear the clip!

-Joao

[phrenology]

Assophonic mic placement: neumann placed right under the drummers ass on the throne, pointed at the kick.

[Tomasz]

Assophonic mic placement: neumann placed right under the drummers ass on the throne, pointed at the kick.

Kick-ass! I believe that's the technical term for this technique!!!!

[burnthair donethat]

I've done a variation on the danggling the mic above/around the source. I just made the source dangle around a coincident pair. I recorded a voice loaded it into my phone, taped my phone to a mic cable and swung it around my stereo set up while playing the file at full volume. I still don't know what to do with those two tracks.

[Zachg]

Here's another one that was kinda cool. I've got this tremolo pedal for guitar, an Electro Harmonix Stereo Pulsar, than we ran some screaming vocals through for a metal project that's in right now. There's a certain setting on the pedal that turns it into a ring-mod kinda sound, great fun! It sounds totally evil now.

The other cool pedal is a Digitech Chorus Factory CF-7. With every knob set to the max and using the 3 or 4 mode you can get that metallic, almost robotic (not in an autotune knida way) vocal sound with normal singers (oxymoron :D )

I'll hopefully post more later...
Zach

[sorkc]

Hi there, thank you for not being gearslutz :-)

Wonder what you could do with this guy (and a fishbowl): http://www.dpamicrophones.com/en/products.aspx?c=Item&category=137&item=24086

[Mixwell]

Hi there, thank you for not being gearslutz :-)

Wonder what you could do with this guy (and a fishbowl): http://www.dpamicrophones.com/en/products.aspx?c=Item&category=137&item=24086

That might work, since I think I'm about to drown my clients in a kiddy pool.

[Mixwell]

For the metal bands I've used piezo drum triggers that weren't actually triggering anything... just for the impact.

Sorry MOOSE, I don't think standard recording practices should apply
btheadbtheadbtheadbtheadbtheadbtheadbtheadbthead

[Sandyrb]

Okay here's one that's not necessarily crazy but it was fun and yielded some great results.

We did a drum session the other day for a kinda eighties hair rock song so we wanted that great big "stadium rock" drum sound. The Grand Hall wasn't available so I left the door of the Live Room open and stashed some mics in the corridor. We clamped an E22 to the roof girder, there were a couple of C617s on tall stands, a Beyer M69 "looking" along the corridor toward the Live Room and finally we left the C720 where it was in the Booth and left that door open too.

So we ended up with this HUGE ambient drum sound despite being in an average sized room. Great fun! :)

Plus the kid who was playing really aced it.

Cheers,

[Dan]

Hi there, thank you for not being gearslutz :-)

Wonder what you could do with this guy (and a fishbowl): http://www.dpamicrophones.com/en/products.aspx?c=Item&category=137&item=24086

I'd return it, build one myself for $50 (including waterproof connectors), get an awesome steak, a fantastic bottle of wine, and still have enough left over to buy about a hundred pornos.

If you're interested, there's actually plenty of stuff on the web about DIY contact mics & hydrophones. If you're just looking to make sfx for yourself or get that weird <something>, then you're much better off with a 25 cent piezo element, a tin can, and some epoxy than a $3000 hydrophone.

-Dan.

[ROCKER STUDIOS]

Have not done this yet but a fellow Drum Engineer said he puts a 12" speaker with an XLR out in front of the Kick drum He said the speaker is the mic and it gives you great bass. Anyone ever tried this

[Fredo]

Have not done this yet but a fellow Drum Engineer said he puts a 12" speaker with an XLR out in front of the Kick drum He said the speaker is the mic and it gives you great bass. Anyone ever tried this

Not with a 12", but with a Yamaha Sub Kick, which is 8" I believe. It works on the same principle as when you plug headphones into a microphone jack and yell into them. The sound pressure moves the magnets in the speaker and creates a signal to flow back through the wire into the mic jack. Electric current is not biased at to which way it flows really, it will go whichever way it is being pushed/pulled. The Sub Kick only generates low frequencies, because it takes a lot of energy and power to get such a large diaphram moving, something you will not find in the higher frequencies of a kick. It works well to augment another mic on the kick, but not alone. There is pretty much no attack on such a large diaphragm, the transient response is not good because it is hard to move something so big so fast.

Edit: The Sub Kick is a 6.5" driver in a 10" drum shell. Should have done a simple search before I speculated.

[ROCKER STUDIOS]

Not with a 12", but with a Yamaha Sub Kick, which is 8" I believe. It works on the same principle as when you plug headphones into a microphone jack and yell into them. The sound pressure moves the magnets in the speaker and creates a signal to flow back through the wire into the mic jack. Electric current is not biased at to which way it flows really, it will go whichever way it is being pushed/pulled. The Sub Kick only generates low frequencies, because it takes a lot of energy and power to get such a large diaphram moving, something you will not find in the higher frequencies of a kick. It works well to augment another mic on the kick, but not alone. There is pretty much no attack on such a large diaphragm, the transient response is not good because it is hard to move something so big so fast.
Yes I need to try that maybe a mic on the beater and the speaker in front:)

[Mixwell]

I've done it with a 15" and it was like god came down on every first and third beat.

I just use a standard 6" driver and it gives you the needed punch to the gut, without too much trouble.

[Joao Brandao]

I use a 8'' driver that I bought for €15. We soldered a guitar cable with a TS connector to the driver and plug it into a DI (usually a Little Labs Redeye). I would never spend €360 on a Yamaha Subkick.

[Tomasz]

I use 15" bass cabinet. actually it's a 2 -15 cabinet, but the top speaker is blown. made a custom cable and Zeus himself, is now barking on every kick hit. As mentioned above, smaller speakers work great as well, it's just convenient and works with the 15 for me. No stands or mounting issues. Any speaker will do really.. I've used discarded projection television speakers for all sorts of interesting sounds.

[hamjam]

i always do something 'fucked up' to spice up my sessions and have some fun!

for a death metal project, the cookie monster singer was 6' and 300lbs. he let me tape a pzm to his chest! awesome guttural sounds!:)

i owned a short bus w/ no seats and had a singer do his trax inside of it w/ a mic @ the back. cool verb effect

put a 414 in a dryer while pointing a guitar amp at it

pumped an entire mix to a converted radio shack telephone listener (i turned it into a guitar amp) to get a 1930's radio sound. works cool w/ smokey amps as well!

[Mixwell]

I've seen a freind engineer use a 3-5 ft long PVC tube with his drum mikes.

He aims it up towards the sky with the butt of the tube in between the toms and kick.

Then he sticks a mike at the end.

I made a tube out of aluminum, strapped it to our ceiling, put a speaker at one end, and a crappy mike at the other.

I could keep going, but the Shadow has archives that would make us all look like amateur noise makers.

MORE TUBES OF DIFFERENT MATERIALS - THEY SOUND DIFFERENT

8 FT Cardboard Tube with a microphone submerged into the tail side.

Snorkel the Tube in between the rack tom and kick drum.

4 on the floor sounds like a nintendo game under water.

[frobs]

Anyone read about this in TapeOp last year sometime? It's a two-mic setup that apparently uses some nasty phase relationships to get some sick sounds. I lost the issue it was in and have been kicking myself just about every time I record a trippy guitar solo

[The MexICAN]

I've done it with a 15" and it was like god came down...

Uhhhh.....? Behind you?

[The MexICAN]

I have been wanting to try this for a while. Put a Leslie with as many reflective surfaces as I can and record the reflections. I'll do it sometime this week.

[Mixwell]

3 Ft Card Board Tube with a Royer 122V stuck into a hole in the middle.

Not featured in this picture was the adjacent kick drum and drum set complete with Sandwich Style Junk Yard Snare Drum, which consisted of a Snare upside down on the floor, underneath a Floor Tom, with another snare drum resting on it. I'll take a picture the next time I stack a snare.

The tube is good for bleed control too....