Playing a pickup…

Posted on November 30, 2016 Posted in Improvisation, instrument making, UncategorizedTagged David Birchall, Improvisation, pickup, research, stringless guitarLeave a comment

New youtube EP showing a first exploration of straight to guitar pickup to metal sounds. Recorded straight into the recorder on headphones; using an extremity of volume and zero overdrive (an unusual feature for me!) to make the small interesting elements audible. This is part of a longer piece of research looking at ways to generate sound from pickups. The main approaches so far are using interference in the electromagnetic to generate sounds and using non-traditional methods of string playing as you hear here.

Huddersfield Bicycle Orchestras!

Posted on June 10, 2014 Posted in instrument makingTagged David Birchall, Huddersfield Bicycle Orchestra, huw wahl, Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra, Sarah McWatt1 Comment

Been working the last couple of weeks on a really exciting project for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to coincide with the Tour De France’s Grand Depart from Yorkshire in July.

You can see various stages of production on one of our newly developed instruments for the commission, the Frame Harp.

There will be two public workshops on the 20th and 21st June in Huddersfield. Find out more here.

Light Theremin

Posted on October 9, 2013 Posted in Improvisation, instrument making, UncategorizedTagged arduino, light thereminLeave a comment

I was working the start of the week trying to find my way around the first few basic Arduino projects… been really fun! Finally got to a point where I’d built up enough knowledge to have a go at this light theremin, great because this kind of interaction with sources in the world and sound is really where I want to go with it. There’s millions of videos of people playing around with this light theremin but I just couldn’t help myself in my excitment!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd_Cxvv4V_c

Acoustic Drone Machine

Posted on September 11, 2013 Posted in instrument makingLeave a comment

Carrying on exploring the research I’ve done the last couple of years into self playing turntable agitating friction string drone machines! This one was totally acoustic thanks to the piano frame. Sounds below. Planning to develop this into an installation at some point

https://soundcloud.com/davidmbirchall/acoustic-friction-drone-1

Stringless Guitars

Posted on August 16, 2013 Posted in instrument makingTagged David Birchall, pickup, stringless guitarLeave a comment

Something I developed so I could do the on top of pick up work on tour recently without having to cart an instrument round with me (though admittedly I did also pack a travel guitar) Really fun and compact. Can finally tour with a holdall!

The single coil version was first one i developed for my own use. Made a humbucker one last week with a friend for a tour he’s about to do. Fascinating bits of kit; I developed mine with really specific idea in place related to my playing but of course the 5/6 people who have tried playing them have found pretty varied and radically different ways to use them!

More developments on these to come…

New Bike Sculpture

Posted on April 14, 2013September 20, 2013 Posted in instrument making, Levenshulme Bicycle OrchestraTagged Levenshulme Bicycle OrchestraLeave a comment

Designed by Huw and myself and crafted by his fair hands. Bike Orchestra practices with this as the only sonic source have been going great. Gigs to follow later in the year.

Cymatic experiments

Posted on September 28, 2012September 30, 2012 Posted in instrument makingTagged carsten nicolai, castlefield gallery, cymatics, David Birchall, film, haroon mirza, speaker preparationsLeave a comment

Been working today on making some films showing some of the methods I’ve used recently to make sound visible; technically speaking I’ve discovered this is cymatics. I became interested in it a few years ago when I inherited a broken marshall 1x 12 combo the speaker of which worked but the amp part was broken, one thing lead to another and with proceding house and studio moves I disemboweled the speaker from the amp and got to carrying out a whole variety of speaker preparations really just as research.

The work I was doing in August with Bekke Platt & Aliyah Hussain for a dance piece (which you can see some of at Castlefield Gallery on 13th October) really set me off thinking about the weird and wonderful things that are possible through finding different ways to make sound visible; these films being just one of them. This was all first sparked by an encounter with Carsten Nicolai’s work via a Gerhard Richter painting on display in the city gallery in Leicester sometime in the early noughties. A summer visit to Manchester’s City Gallery also brought me into contact with a Haroon Mirza sound sculpture which operated in a similar area.