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!