To create this sound I used a large hollow letter G and slid it along a Formica table top. Grandpa-George has an expansive collection of letter Gs from old signs and other sources hanging on one of their walls.
The G that I used to make this sound had not been mounted yet. The material that the letter was made from made a resonant screech when the thin edges of the back side of it slid along the Formica table top.
Screeching Letter G
There were dozens of great things to record at the Grandpa-George studio space. One of them was a toy Douglas picked up at thrift shop for less than three dollars called the Talk and Learn Alphabet Center. It’s a kind of cheaper version of a Speak and Spell.
The voice recordings on the unit are great, sometimes hilarious, and have a lovely low bit graininess to them. Me and Derrin Evers took turns pressing the buttons while the recorder was running. Here’s a brief selection of what we collected.
Alphabet Center
I made this recording of an old Smith-Corona mechanical typewriter recently at the my good friends interactive company Grandpa-George. Douglas Brull sat and typed while I held the recorder.
There’s loads of examples of typewriter recordings around, but I could not pass up the opportunity to make one of my own. Here’s thirty-eight seconds of what I captured.
Smith-Corona Mechanical Typewriter
Today I had a student ask how to make old science fiction machinery sounds. The sound he wanted was for a robot starting up then slowly shutting down. We tried a few different things and finally settled on using Reason to create a random sequence of notes.
I started with a chromatic scale and then randomized it using the change events function. We played it back in Subtractor and messed with the patch until it sounded like what he was going for. The tricky part was pitch bending the sequence. Reason 3.5 does not support tempo automation, so although we could use the pitch bend wheel the notes were all at the same speed. To get around this we exported the audio and loaded it into NN-XT as a sample, then applied automation to the pitch wheel with a twenty four semitone range.
Robot Shutdown
I rarely experience the near silence of still, late nights in remote areas like the Northern shore of Lake Superior. The quiet was amplified (is that an oxymoron?) by a two inch layer of fresh snow that seemed to absorb the outdoor ambience. The lake was as still as I’ve ever seen it. The combination of these factors made it possible to actually hear the snow falling. You can identify the sound of the snow falling as a high frequency crackling as the flakes touched down on my surroundings. The large wet flakes sound similar to rain. There’s also an irregular, low frequency thumping sound that might be plates of ice gently bumping into each other on the lake.
Snow Falling