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Re: Found sounds, contact mic recommendation



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