Cupped Hand Controlled MBP Feedback

flashlightThis feedback produced by my new MacBook Pro is a little less harsh. I attempted to control the way it was feeding back by moving a cupped hand up and down just above the built-in mic hidden under the left hand speaker grill. The closer you get to the cupping the mic the louder the feedback is. Actually I wasn’t sure where the mic was when I started this experiment and used my cupped hand to locate it. By the way, cupping the mic is generally a bad idea. I hope it doesn’t void my warrantee.

Cupped Hand Controlled Feedback

Horrible MacBook Pro Built-in Mic Feedback

Grouchy PandaThe following sound contains piercing high frequencies. I don’t suggest playing it back at at anything higher than a very low volume.

This sound was produced accidentally after starting up Live and opening a recent document on my new MacBook Pro. A couple of tracks were record enabled and the input settings reverted to the default because Live 8 did not know about my external sound card yet. Luckily my MacBook Pro’s audio out was not plugged into my mixer, so the sound was only amplified through the internal speakers.

Naturally, my first inclination was to capture the feedback. My second was to try and control it by cupping the mic hidden under the left hand speaker grill. I had some success doing this. For now here’s the original feedback.

Playback With Caution!

Rhodes Feedback

In order to get this example of feedback I ran my suitcase model Rhodes, which I confine to my studio, through an outboard processor with some nice amp modeling and cranked up the gain. For the processing I used an eleven year old Yamaha A3000 sampler. The A3000 allows you to edit and apply processing to an incoming signal and it has some pretty nice sounding effects. Once I had adjusted the processing I held down the sustain pedal on the Rhodes and let the amplification do the rest. Tapping or gently knocking the instrument also produced some nice sounds. Here’s a snippet of the results.

Rhodes Feedback