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OT: Found sounds, contact mic recommendationDear Qua, you wrote "Any recommendations of what kind of mic could be used to do this (for micing found objects)?" "Wow, Qua, with your sensibility, I'm so sad that you can't make the looping festival this year. I can't wait to hear you play. You would really resonate with Chris Cohn's, Jon Hanes', Dark Muse's and Matt Davignon's and, most probably, my work in terms of found sound fun. Also, as far as I know, most if not all contact mics are piezo mics which means that you can build one yourself for under $8 at any radio shack (Tandy in the UK). Here's what you do in a nutshell. It doesnt take longer than 5-10 minutes. You buy a piezo buzzer. and carefully break off the black hard plastic casing (I use needle nose pliers) exposing the inner wafer. Then solder to leads to each of the leads coming off the wafer and attach them to a female 1/4" jack. Then you buy a container of Plasti Grip (which is liquid tool handle material that is in liquid form until you dip the piezo into it, hang it by a rubber band from a coathanger and let it dry into a rubbery solid. Whammo...................build three or four at a time and you have a little army of piezo mics that work well with everything. Any time you see pricey dot pickups on guitars they are almost always just silicon piezo pickups..............no different than what you can build yourself. Additionally, a lot of places will sell sets of red dot 'drum' pickups that are already premade. Here while back I split a set of 10 of these with a friend for a whopping $60 USD. I use them for all kinds of things........found objects, string instruments, frame drums, sexual vibrators <grin> anything that vibrates. You then can tape or velcro them onto the surfaces you want to resonate. A lot of times you can tape them to a container that amplifies that acoustically amplifies the sound you are trying to mic...........................like a very cool container can be made out of packing styrofoam, in fact a cheap styrofoam beer container is an excellent inexpensive resonater (as our various cardboard and wood boxes). You can tape the piezo element to the container itself so that the object can freely vibrate (which it can't if the piezo is directly applied to the resonating object. There is a fantastic book that my wife bought me called, 'Getting Bigger Sound' - Pickups and Microphones for your Musical Instruments' by Bart Hopkins. I highly recommend it. You can order it through my wife, Christine Wedertz at www.bookworksaptos.com if you are in the US and can't find it elsewhere. (and a little plug here: if you value continued artistry in literature, support independent booksellers like the Bookworks in Aptos because they are not telling the publishers who to publish and who not to publish like the biggees like Amazon.com and Borders) Lately, I'm really into putting contact microphones onto portable battery powered fans and neck massagers and dildoes and then getting them to feedback with my rad little Vox battery powered guitar amplifier that has built in effects in it (including a compressor and a compressor phaser combo that really lets me control the feedback with the tone and gain knobs on the Vox. You can get a symphony of noise out of this process and I"m just loving it......... recording the results with a microphone and then slicing and dicing at will with a million VST effects in Fruity Loops on my computer.. Good luck and keep posting the results. I hope you can make Y2K8 if we do it. yours, Rick