New setup advice

Started by Kollaps, August 17, 2014, 07:31:00 PM

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Kollaps

Hello,

I'm relatively new to the noise scene and I was hoping that the users of this forum could point me in the right direction in regards to acquiring an actual setup. I already do a lot of Keiji Haino-esque 'noise' stuff with a guitar however I wanted to get more seriously into it in order to expand my repertoire of sounds.

I'm very interested in feedback and lo-fi sounds. Pharmakon and would be a great example of the sounds I'm into and looking for. I'm particularly interested in the setup used in this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV6iaC1kWMg

To some it up, I'm starting from scratch and would appreciate any input or advice into where I should begin. Thank you.


davenpdx

#1
As you mentioned Pharmakon, you may find this thread about the gear in her live setup to be useful:
http://www.maniacsonly.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3252

In the video you linked, the setup is somewhat different than what is discussed in the thread above. In the clip, she uses mic'd sheet metal in the beginning. If you don't already have this information, here is how to assemble a contact mic:
http://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html

Making contact mics is easy, but making sturdy contact mics takes a lot more practice and experimentation. I dunno just how new you are to all of this, but if you haven't already tried making contact mics, it's cheap and is probably a good place to start.

Of course, I should give the standard noise advice: don't fixate on gear, but think of the sort of sounds you want and find some way to create them. Ingenuity and resourcefulness are more important than having such-and-such piece of gear.

PS - Other useful advice for beginners:
http://www.stenchforums.net/post9828.html#p9828
Mystery Attacks: updates / sounds
Rouge Label: updates

Cementimental

Get as many as possible free/cheap pieces of equipment that make, record, play or effect sound in any way whatsoever, and connect them together in various ways

Cementimental

Pretty nice bunch of gear!

I find fairly basic feedback loops good for bass rumbling, even a couple of pure no-input mixer fx send to channels can be good for some kind of rhythmical click/thump kind of sounds

C601

I've gotten a good rumble by shoving a contact mic up my ass and grunting

Cementimental

yes that's feedback :) Just need more pedals/complexity and/or some specific amount of gain/eq to get more interesting sounds

Try some different things. eg fx send to mixer channel 1, headphone out to channel 2 gives you maybe more control since there's two seperate loops rather that one which kind of goes in and out again....

Pure 'no input mixer' feedback ideally needs a fairly complex mixer so you can connect a lot of different channels and sends etc to get a more interesting sound. Having said that one of my first albums was almost all pure mixer feedback just using a cheap DJ mixer and an even cheaper camcorder audio mixer and like one distortion pedal, without any permission or instruction from the internet. :)

tinnitustimulus

Everybody in harsh noise has either a DOD death metal, DOD Grunge, Boss bass overdrive and/or Boss heavy metal for the most part. Do not buy one of those immediately though, this has become kind of stagnant for the genre even though I have two of those aforementioned pedals. I have no idea what the RSH 01 is like, but I personally find the bass overdrive after a DOD fx25 envelope filter decent if the sensitivity is low on an amplified object. I usually need a distortion before the envelope to flatten and manually control the filter when I want to, preferable something that has range in gain and EQ (tone).

a little bit of phase effect to repeating samples goes a long way, having it on full blast makes it sound stupid to me though. 

sometimes people put springs on amplified objects to add a longer sustain of a lower signal before it feedbacks into itself and it does tend to have more interesting feedback changes. I prefer double sided mounting tape when I use contact mics on things, its fairly cheap and everybody in the store knows where it is from making displays with it, though get the indoor kind since when it's too strong the mic fall apart before the mounting tape does.

Feedback loops/no-input are a heck of a lot more satisfying if you have an equalizer in the scenario, otherwise you really don't have much of an say to whatever frequency it will be. I'm tired of them frankly, but I did those things for 8 years so maybe its just me.

Leewar

Dont buy anything anyone else uses.

tinnitustimulus

Quote from: Kollaps on August 22, 2014, 07:34:18 AM
I'm running it straight into a pair of computer speakers without any DI's or anything... Checked all the channels, volume is maxed out as is the master. Why is it so quiet? I was kind of expecting it to blow my ass out of the room.

Bass is not as powerful when it is clipped to the point of being a bunch of clicks. This even worse with digital stuff, as analog stuff tends to be softer with clipping. No Input can defy logic from high volume offsetting the signal so hard, it clips to nothing, becoming quieter when you turn it up.

Häkkis Atte

Quote from: Kollaps on August 24, 2014, 08:28:42 PM
Cheers man.

Ah, just curious about the use of tape decks in noise music? Are they just used as a sound source? I've noticed a few artists that I like, such as Pharmakon, use them and I'm curious as to what their actual use is.

They can be used as sound source but also as recording devices. Tape can handle louder noise than digital devices because of the tape compression. Also tape clipping sounds different and somehow more "natural" than digital clipping.

Cementimental

also, tape loops offer a lot of possibilities especially in a 4track or more recorder. possible tho fiddly with modified audiocassettes, much easier and more possibilities with open-reel 1/4" tape recorders

tinnitustimulus

The tape player for the blind has multiple outputs for effect possibilities. I tried to explain how i use tape loops on the gear pic thread, but i think i got too meta about it.