Songs and Sonics

Music stores are great, if all you want are instruments.

I love instruments. I have dozens of them. But sometimes that’s not enough.

I’m jealous of rock bands that are happy using only the sounds from their guitars and drums. I’m equally envious of composers who are satisfied with the broad palette of colors available from an orchestra.

Because sometimes — to my ears, anyway — a musical situation calls for a specific sort of texture that can’t be purchased from a music store.

So here’s a cheap, easy-to-build gizmo I made which satisfies one particular sonic need. It’s not a need that pops up often, but it’s capable of making interesting noises which sound nothing like a normal instrument.

I call it the Audio Wand.

There are two possible reactions upon seeing this thing:

1. “What the…?”

2. “OK, I get it. But why?”

Let’s start with the first case.

The Audio Wand is a $3 portable cassette player with the head removed and screwed onto the end of a cut down yardstick. That’s all there is to it.

There are no fancy electronic schematics involved; only a three-conductor Radio Shack cable soldered from the back of the tape head to the cassette player. In other words, this is a fully-functional tape player, other than for the fact that the head is now functioning outside the player.

(Disclaimer: If you attempt this project, only use tape players that run on batteries and require 9 volts or less. If you are not experienced with electronics, do not modify any device that plugs into an AC wall outlet. Proceed at your own risk!)

How do you use the Audio Wand?

First, record some interesting things onto a cassette tape. Then pull the tape out of the cassette shell and cut it into 11″ strips. Use Scotch tape to attach each end of the strip to a thin cardboard surface. I used some nice shiny black folders from OfficeMax, which I cut into “pages.”

When you’re ready to make noise, hook the tape player’s headphone jack to an effects box, press play on the cassette player, hold the Audio Wand like a pen, and run the wand over a tape strip.

How is this different from turntable scratching? Or rocking a tape reel on a reel-to-reel deck?

Well, for one thing, the Audio Wand is less predictable. You don’t have as much control over the sound. That’s not a problem, that’s a feature. This unpredictability often leads to some pleasant surprises.

If you have interesting sounds on both sides of a tape strip (meaning, “Side A” and “Side B” of the cassette, when the tape strip was inside the cassette), you can play a sound with the wand and, by moving your hand slightly, begin playing the sound on the other side of the tape in reverse. Or if you angle it right, you can play both sides of the tape (one forward, one backwards) simultaneously.

There’s an advantage the Audio Wand has over turntable scratching: Because it’s trivial to make your own cassettes, it’s easy to use non-copyrighted source material. And it doesn’t necessarily sound like turntable scratching, since your source material doesn’t have to be other people’s records.

You can make quite a few weird EQ changes as the angle of the head changes (the fancy technical phrase for this is “azimuth misalignment”). Also, with a bit of practice, you can quickly switch to another tape strip on the same cardboard sheet when the music calls for it.

If you begin to take this Audio Wand business seriously, consider storing all the tape strip pages in a three-ring binder. In my binder, I’ve split the pages into general themes: Synthesizer sounds, organ sounds, drum sounds, music box sounds, and so on.

You can use the Audio Wand to get some interesting sounds from a microcassette recorder tape. Since a microcassette recorder can record half or a quarter as slow as a regular cassette deck, you can fit a lot more information in the the same number of inches as a regular cassette tape. Plus, microcassette recorders have magical sonic benefits which shouldn’t be overlooked.

I’ve used the Audio Wand briefly on Dionysus (from the Menlo Park EP), the croaking frog noise in Swim (from Sonic Rescue League Vol 1), and somewhere in the end section of Really Really Weird (from the Me and My Arrow EP and Girls Aliens Food album).

Naturally, you’ll probably never be able to play The Star Spangled Banner on the Audio Wand. Even if it were possible, I’m not sure I’d want to hear it. But the Audio Wand fills an occasional sonic need — and can be quite cool when there are effects on it.

Check out the following Audio Wand mp3. This was all one take, just after I’d built the Audio Wand and created my first “page” of tape strips. All of the source material came from my Sequential Circuits MAX synthesizer, an instrument not known for its expressiveness. (Even though the MAX is an analog synthesizer, there are no knobs, no pitch bend wheel, and no modulation wheel. And you can’t change any sound parameters from the front panel — you can only do it through MIDI.)

When the MAX’s sounds are played by the Audio Wand and followed by a delay effect, suddenly they appear to be… alive!

Audio Wand + Delay

Let me know if you build your own!

“So how do you record drums?”

That’s one question that inevitably arises when talking with a fellow home studio DIYer.

The question isn’t pointed at microphone selection and placement, but at something much more fundamental: How do you tell the computer to start and stop recording?

There’s a lot of hassles involved in recording real drums. And if you’re recording yourself, chances are you’ve got an additional headache: It’s not easy to press a key on the computer to start recording, run to the drum set, gain composure, and play a winning drum take.

In recent years, products like the $200 Tranzport have entered the market, which diminish the need for basement relay races.

I needed the Tranzport a few years before it existed, so I came up with a $40 homebrew solution using a wireless joypad and free software. It doesn’t have all the features of the Tranzport, but it might be good enough for your needs. It’s been good enough for mine — I’ve recorded almost all of The Simple Carnival’s tracks this way. I haven’t been (pardon the pun) remotely tempted to upgrade to something better.

The Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 is a standard wireless gamepad, and, as you can see from the picture above, I’ve put stickers on its buttons to represent the Pro Tools LE functions I use most often when tracking. Here’s a more detailed view.

The right joystick doesn’t do anything — maybe I’ll come up with a use for it one day. The gamepad handles rewind and fast forward. The up and down directions are not used.

Here’s a diagram showing the buttons on the back of the gamepad.

JoyToKey, a free Windows application, maps — you guessed it — joystick functions to keyboard buttons. Here’s what my JoyToKey setup looks like.

And this is how I record drums! And flute, marimba, vocals, organ, piano, congas, guitar, bass, Fender Rhodes, Clavinet, synthesizers — anything where I’m not standing directly in front of the computer keyboard.

Yes, sometimes I have to squint if I’m moving the mouse pointer with the joystick on the other side of the room. It’s just something you get used to after a while. On the other hand, most of these functions don’t require you to look at the screen anyway. After you arm your tracks, just about everything else can be done with your eyes closed.

There’s a nice bonus when using this technique with a guitar, or any instrument with pickups: Since you’re not performing in front of your computer monitor, you won’t pick up any interference from it.

Have fun on the other side of the room.

You want grunge? You want compression? You want a grimy, filthy-sounding microphone where everything that comes out the other end sounds lo-fi in a (sometimes) pleasing way?

Well, if you don’t already have this magic box, look no further than your local OfficeMax.

That’s right, a standard microcassette recorder is your gateway to a world of sonic suckiness.

Note that this is not one of those newfangled digital recorders — although I’m sure there could be uses for that, too. I’m talking about the ones which use those tiny little cassette tapes that are getting harder and harder to find every year as technology marches on.

A microcassette recorder isn’t just for college lectures or surreptitiously collecting inadmissible evidence. No sirree. It should be a required piece of gear in any home studio.

Obviously, you can use these recorders as rough idea collectors. What’s not so obvious is that they often fit perfectly into a plain old mic clip.

If you sing and play an instrument when writing songs, a microcassette recorder makes a great “vocal” mic. The built-in compression on these devices is usually so crazy that it will capably pick up the sound of your instrument, even if the mic is pointed at your mouth.

(By the way, if you put the microcassette recorder in a mic clip, be sure the mic clip isn’t pressing against the tape door area. You can get some sounds which are even more screwed up that way — you’re messing with the tape head azimuth alignment — but you could also hurt your recorder. You’ve been warned!)

If you’re serious about using a microcassette recorder as an idea catcher, do yourself a favor and invest in a bunch of microcassettes. Then, throw them in a Trivial Pursuit card box or something similar. Keep all the tapes rewound to the beginning, and pull out a random one when inspiration strikes.

But let’s get to the heart of what these gadgets excel at doing: acting as a lo-fi mic/compressor combo.

Start recording with the microcassette recorder, then run a cable out of the earphone jack to your DAW’s line input. If your microcassette recorder is like most, then voila! You’ve got a unique-sounding mic for when you’re in a grungy mood.

Try the recorder as an overhead or room mic for drums. Try it on piano and check out the squashed, Beatles-like tones. Use it on vocals for a telephone effect. Play back only the vocal tracks or some other element through your monitors, position the microcassette recorder appropriately, then record the microcassette recorder’s output as a new track. (Be careful not to send the newly recorded signal back to your monitors, or you’ll get feedback… although that might be interesting, too!)

Note that the mechanical parts of the tapes themselves can contribute an undesirable noise to this “mic”, so you might want to remove the tape and stick your finger over the safety tab mechanism when pressing the record button.

Another thing to watch out for is that, depending on the model, the microcassette recorder’s circutry might delay the incoming signal by, say, 1/10 of a second. If this is the case, your recorded microcassette mic performance might feel a bit out of the pocket compared to the tracks you’ve already recorded. So you may need to adjust your microcassette mic tracks after recording them in your DAW.

It’s also possible to use a microcassette recorder in a time-shifted sort of way. If the tape noise doesn’t bother you (and why should it? The sound is already awful), throw in a microcassette and record an entire vocal take onto it. Try it with both record speeds. The slower speed adds an extra layer of grunge by severely attenuating the high end. Which speed is best depends on the source material and how nasty you want the sound to be.

After you’ve recorded your part, play it back and record the result into your DAW. You will need to shift things around, as it’s unlikely the recordings will be synchronized (or stay synchronized). You may find this “out of time” effect appealing, depending on the song.

I used this time-shifted mic technique (with a backwards reverb) for the “radio” voices on Really Really Weird. You can hear the microcassette recorder voice the second time “Really Really Weird” is sung on this clip. I also used a lot of microcassette mic stuff (piano, drum room mic, vocals) on Hey Lancaster, a song from the upcoming Girls Aliens Food album. (Sorry, no sound clip yet!)

And if nothing else, you can use a microcassette recorder to make beatbox patterns. Tapping on the recorder could make interesting source material for a dirty-sounding loop, or something that pops up momentarily.

Did I miss any other uses?

One of the things I was hoping to do with Songs and Sonics was share some easy projects you can build for your home studio.

This project is not one of them.

In 2002, I got the idea that I needed a marimba for my home studio.

I don’t know why I needed a marimba. I just wanted that sound.

Marimbas are notoriously expensive. Professional marimbas start in the $2,000 range for a used instrument. New marimbas are in the $6,000-$12,000+ range.

I couldn’t justify spending that much for an instrument that was going to be one of dozens sitting in my studio. I was never going be a full-time marimba player. I just wanted that sound when working on a recording that called for it.

You can get a pretty realistic marimba sound by using a sampler. In fact, you can capture the timbre and make something sound even better than the real thing with a sampler. A really good sampled sound can sound almost hyper-realistic. You can trick listeners into thinking they’re hearing the “real thing.” I’ve been fooled, for sure.

But I don’t think you can capture the soul of an instrument that way.

The subtleties and imperfections are usually missing from a sampled or synthesized instrument, which is sometimes the most interesting part. If the subtleties are in there, they’re often exaggerated to a comical degree, or you need to really work at adding those fake subtleties back in.

Plus, playing a keyboard isn’t as fun as standing in front of an imposing piece of furniture with a couple mallets and jumping around to hit the keys. You can feel the vibrations move from the marimba key to the mallet to your arm. There’s a whole physical element missing if you’re working with a simulation.

So I decided to build my own marimba.

Several people asked me if I had the woodworking skills to build a marimba. After some hemming and hawing, the answer was… “Uh… no.”

On my previous woodworking project, I had trouble building a plywood box with all four sides of equal length. But I decided to go ahead with the marimba project anyway. It’s only wood, right? How hard could it be?

My dad offered his help, not really knowing what he was about to get into. But I guess those are the kinds of helpful things you do when you’re a dad. Neither of us consider ourselves professional woodworkers. We are practical, patient, and determined… and that’s about it.

Like all construction projects, it will always take longer, be more expensive, and be more difficult than you initially imagined.

But it was worth it.

To be continued…