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 toContinue reading “Playing a pickup…”
Category Archives: instrument making
Huddersfield Bicycle Orchestras!
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 instrumentsContinue reading “Huddersfield Bicycle Orchestras!”
Light Theremin
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 soundContinue reading “Light Theremin”
Acoustic Drone Machine
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
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 forContinue reading “Stringless Guitars”
New Bike Sculpture
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
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,Continue reading “Cymatic experiments”
turntable and guitar strings
Doing some work yesterday with turntable and strings which I’ve had on the go the last few weeks. Trying to work through various ideas to isolate what works and what doesn’t, made a bunch of recordings which are mainly textural, drones and processing those back end of last week which I’m mixing at the moment.Continue reading “turntable and guitar strings”
Post-apocalyptic instrument number 1 and/or “Trumpetar”
Got a little bit of inspiration looking at Jethro Brice’s excellent blog http://futuremuseum.wordpress.com/ the other day. Its an investigation of some our not so smart current uses of resources looked back on from two centuries in the future as well as imaginings of some immediate post-apocalyptic responses to environmental/political meltdown. It set me off thinkingContinue reading “Post-apocalyptic instrument number 1 and/or “Trumpetar””
