From: Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>
To: LOOPERS DELIGHT (posting) <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 12:03 AM
Subject: Re: Re: PREPARING INSTRUMENTS for LOOPING (and any other performance)
Super balls are also really nice.
They really develop a lot of friction on any surface that they are dragged across.
I'm really into preparing my drum set and other drums (frame drums especially).
Lately, I'm doing a version of 'Sunflower' by Milt Jackson in my weekly jazz gig
where I start the whole tune out with a long dream modal jam (before hitting the head when
the rhythm comes in). I use two super ball mallets with extremely thin and flexible plastic
rods attached to make moaning 'whale', 'dolphin' sounds in a rubato fashion.
Eventually, I morph to play the toms and snareless snares with the super balls as
normal drum mallets (this sounds a bit african hand dum-ish).
It's really effective and almost always gets the patrons of the restaurant I play
at to suddenly stop talking and pay attention to the music (always a good thing - <smile).
I'm also fond of using different sizes of
chain (from the kind found on typical light fixtures- the ones
that are a series of connected metal balls--to very large 1 inch oval chains used for hauling things
on my cymbals and drums.
I found some really killer skinny metal keychain holders. They are circular and have a fastener that
allows you to put the ring over a typical cymbal stand holder with the lengths of chain attached.
One, that I love is the largest and I cut it's length so that it hangs down over the end of the cymbal
by one or two links only. The weight is so heavy, hanging off the flat ride cymbal or crash cymbal
that it causes a buzzing, disortion sound when I hit it that it physical 'gate's the disortion sound quickly
after I strike the cymbal.
Last week, I tried out a very, very slow, version of Brubeck's Take Five with cymbals prepared this way that came off like
an almost Industrial Blues.
That brings
us to brushes (of all kinds): commercial brushes used for drumming, cheap plastic hand brooms, different thicknesses
and hardnesses of vegetable brushes, even some metal flea removal brushes that I bought recently.
With the metal flea brushes (which, I warn you, are Very hard on guitar strings), you can actually tape or glue a piezo
pick up to them, because when you play over a guitar string, the metal tines themselves will resonate like little harps.
These sound AMAZING through pitch shifters and other processing.
With drumset brushes, there has been a tremendous explosion in the number of commercial 'jazz' brushes that are being
sold commercially in the last two or three years alone.
They make them with really soft flexible blue nylon 'wire's, medium soft white nylon wires, hard and thick black nylon wires:
they have new versions that have really minute balls at their
ends which are more percussive on metal surfaces and, of course, there are
different thicknesses and stiffnesses of wire bristles from the original concept for them.
They sound good on almost anything that resonates. I've even considered taking one of my miniature electric guitars (I've collected
four of them) and super glueing different textures to the surface with a piezo pickup attached to the body so I could both drum, scrape
and play my 'prepared' guitar.
