The Cry of Electronics

Do you think you know what your electronics sound like? I doubt you know what they really sound like unless you have attached a telephone pickup coil to them or ran a guitar pickup over them.

I have had one of these telephone pickup coils for a while, but had used it minimally until recently. I was inspired to mess around more with this wonderful piece of equipment after reading Jean-Eduard Miclot's blog post Electromagnetism and seeing Richard Devine at the Propellerhead Producers Conference last weekend where he talked briefly about the pickups. If you've never used one of these I suggest you grab one and stick it on every electric thing you can find. The telephone pickup coils are pretty cheap at MCM Electronics, or you can stop by Radioshack and grab one.

So, on to the sounds. I stuck this little monster on every electronic device I had in my immediate vicinity. The first recording is of my iPod. The pickup was stuck on the wheel/buttons as I scrolled through menus and skipped through a few songs. The interesting part about this recording is that under all the electronic sounds, you can hear the songs that are playing. I did not have headphones plugged in, so the pickup was grabbing the music straight from the harddrive.

IPod Transducer by Googe


The next recording is of my Nintendo DS starting up, loading a game (Final Fantasy IV), playing the game a bit, and saving. The pickup was placed right under the power switch.

DS Transducer by Googe


The third recording is of the laser on my optical mouse.

  Optical Mouse Transducer by Googe


This last recording is of me turning on and off my Markbass Little Mark Tube 800 bass amp. The first part is with the pickup attached to the top above the input and then moved back to the fan. The second sound is with the pickup on top over the fan. The third sound starts out over the fan and is then moved over the power supply, which is right next to the fan. The last part is over the power supply. I love the dissonance of the last part and the high pitched whine that comes after.

Markbass Little Mark Tube Transducer by Googe


  Recording Notes: Recorded with a telephone pickup coil into a Zoom H4n.

This Glass is Made Out of Aliens!

So a while ago we got the KarmaFX Synth Modular and I have spent some time making weird sounds and destroying library sounds with it. My favorite synth that I made is one that I named "Gloop" because it has this magical way of taking anything and turning it into a slimy gloopy sound. I slapped some glass debris in the sampler and this is what I got.

Original glass sound:
Glass Debris by Googe

Through the synth:
Bassy Slime Goop by Googe

After I bounced out that sound I pulled it into Sound Forge and did some random crazy EQing:
EQed Slime Goop by Googe

Then I ran it through Sony elastique Timestretch and got what made me think of aliens chatting:

Alien Radio Chatter by Googe

Recording Notes: The glass debris sounds were recorded with an Edirol R-44 and a Sennheiser ME67.

Laptop Fan

So I was sitting in the office, minding my own business. Our recording engineer, Mark, was sitting on the couch behind me working on his laptop. I was reading an article about the climate scientists and the multitude of death threats they receive when from behind me I hear a horrific grinding noise. I turn around saying "What was that!?"

Mark casually replied "It was my laptop fan."

To which my natural response was to grab the recording gear and get a take, after finishing my article of course. This is what I got:

Grinding Laptop Fan by Googe

Recording Notes: Recorded with an Edirol R-44 and a Sennheiser ME67.