Acoustic/Koto with Paper Clips and other tips for PREPARING LOOPABLE INSTRUMENTS

["Rick Walker (Loop.pooL)" <GLOBAL@cruzio.com>]

John Mark Painter wrote:
"Acoustic/Koto with Paper Clips on the strings trick (I have since ripped
that
one off....sorry)."

Rick Walker replies:
    Can you describe this one in a more detailed manner, please?   I've use
aligator clips, knives and forks and even those Chinese Chrome Balls with
the little chimes in them (used for hand exercises) which sound incredible
if you put the guitar or bass on a very slight incline and let the very
heavy balls roll up slowly towards the pickups.     I love prepared
instruments.   I remember pissing off my mom when I was a kid by pressing
thumb tacks into the felts of our upright parlor piano to get that prepared
honkey tonk sound.  I must of been all of 8 years old when I did that.
Little did I know that someday I would be paid well to do such nonsense ;-)

Maybe we could start a little thread on creative ideas for preparing
instruments.

    I've prepared my drums and cymbals for years with chains and rivets,
magazines, t-shirts,and other things.   My favorite trick lately (all you
looping drummers out there ;-) is to take one of these very thin, textured
dayglo translucent cutting boards that you can buy at fancy cooking 
botiques
for about $5-8 and cutting them out so that they fit onto a snare drum. 
This
takes the pitch of the snare drum way, way down (a la the magazine used on
the snare drum on Get Back by the Beatles) but the texture allows you to
play the cutting board with brushes.  this allows for a tuning damping
technique that is never associated with brush playing.   It sounds like
brushes that have been sampled and pitched a fifth down on a sampler.

Speaking of that devil,  I took a pair of really crappy old 60's japanese
crash cymbals and put them together as
high hats, adding them to a deep Ludwig Coliseum snare drum tuned as low as
possible with the snares as rattly as possible and a huge 28" double headed
kick drum tuned very low to get that 'I sampled this drumset
and pitched it down an octave' sound live.   I have this little three piece
right next two a set of custom built
fiberglass snare drums (6", 8" and 10") that I converted form old 
figerglass
PEARL concert toms that are pitched very high with a 12" inch roto tom,
pitched as low as possible with black naughahyde completely covering both
sides of the drum and tight miced with an AKG D112 and a set of 10" 
Zildjian
recording hi hats.
This little kit is my ersatz 'jungle/drum & bass' kit that sounds like it
has been sampled at 120 bpm and raised up to 160 bpm.    With this bizarre
kit I can play half tempo on the deep kit with trip hop grooves and
double speed 'jungle' rhythms on the little kit,  all in the same song.
The snare drums are so tight
(augmented on their snare sides with wires from a jazz drum brush taped on
to the bottom head for a cool 'snare' sound) that I can do drag rolls
(across the three pitched snares) that sound just like rhythms that have
been chopped up in ReCycle and sequenced as 64note triplets for the machine
gun effect that is used in
jungle. The different pitched snares sound like individual keys being 
played
on a sampler.

    I love the thought of preparing acoustic instruments so that they sound
like electronic manipulations or analogue drum machines.  The upside is 
that
you get far more expression out of the instrument in real time playing. 
Then
you can loop it all and play prepared Acoustic/Koto paperclip guitar!!!!!

Again,  maybe we could start a little thread on creative ideas for 
preparing
instruments.

yours,   Rick Walker (loop.pool)