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
The long cold Winter of 2008 and 2009 is not over yet. Anything can happen, but most of the snow in Minneapolis has melted. I imagine that my sentiments are shared by most Minnesotans when I say that I am ready to move on to the next season. Hopefully this will be the last of my winter themed field recordings for a few months anyway. I recorded these footsteps while trekking through fresh snow near Lake Superior. It was a very still night, so the crunching of the wet snow came through well with very little wind noise interfering.
Footsteps Through Fresh Snow
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