Starring in today’s feature…

Have I turned my music project into a cooking/design blog?

Not exactly!

The perpetual challenge an artist faces in a creative project is simple. The end result has to sound original and a wee bit personal.

Personally, I couldn’t think of any instruments that I definitely wanted, except my drums of course, but their melodic range is as long as my patience is short.

Sounds of life

So instead of using pre-made audio samples like I did earlier, I decided to record something myself. With my skills, though, any melodic instrument was pretty much out of the question. Luckily, digital music softwares provide a chance to try a different approach.

I began to wonder what would normal everyday objects and materials like glass or a piece of furniture sound like as an instrument. Judging by this Vice Thump article, some of pretty inspirational artists seem to be doing it too.

At that moment I happened to stay at my parents house, so the potential source for them lied in their kitchen. All I needed was my iPhone, a sound recording app and some household objects that made interesting noises.

Hell’s kitchen

After some careful kitchenware investigation, I concluded that an empty glass and a metallic coffee jar were the best sounding objects there. They made a short tinkling sound that could be useful to me.

To get some variety from single hitting sounds, I recorded a coffee measuring spoon dropping to the floor. The result was something close to a jingle bell sound. But I still needed more variety than tinkling and jingling.

Earlier that day I remembered thinking how squeaky the bathroom door in that house sounded.

Hell’s bathroom

(Now there’s a reality show I’d like to see Gordon Ramsay host.)

So I walked to the suspiciously squeaky bathroom door and started swaying it back and forth.

The hinges were making a squeak so weird, that I knew I wanted to try turning it into something (at least vaguely) more musical.

Final touches

By themselves, the objects’ sound samples didn’t sound very exciting. But after using this article by Adam Burucs as a guiding reference and experimenting with different effects, I found that they can be turned into pretty interesting new sounds!

The coffee jar and McDonald’s glass along with a hint of saw keyboard became a pretty decent sounding combination that resembled a robotic music box.

The dropping coffee spoon became an awesome, laser-like rhythmic pattern. To make things more melodic, I mixed it with another keyboard arpeggio sound.

And the door? I transposed the high pitched squeak waaaaaaaay down and well… it’s a bass sound now!

I was genuinely surprised over the impact of adding effects made to the objects’ original sound. The glass and jar noises turned into a cool substitutes for keyboard sounds and the door squeak, together with a spoon drop, became a weird but interesting rhythmic pattern.

The Mad Sound Scientist

The whole experiment of recording sounds from everyday objects turned out to be huge fun. I could spend all day making new instruments out of, well, anything.

But I can’t get stuck on this point, because I have a track to finish.

Deadline

I feel like I should set myself a deadline of finishing this track. In the midst of these last few posts, I have been at the practice pad playing drums over the stuff I’ve created. I can tell you that I’m really close to being able to start recording this stuff.

So, here it is, my promise and an ultimatum:



I will have this track finished and recorded by Sunday, September 10th.

I’ll see you in hell if I haven’t.