I was quite interested in this. I thought the unusual instruments were extremely cool and made great sounds. That is until they said the instrument sounds were generated by VST plugins. What a letdown. After weeks of making, programming and bending our own instruments I thought they had done a similar thing but on a larger and more complicated scale, but really it was just a homemade bassoon and MIDI light harp. No different really than me bringing my homemade bass to Uni and playing through plugins to create a bunch of weird sounds. The only thing really to take from this was the fact that mic placement had a great effect on the timbral quality. For example, the wind instruments were basically just the same as any other wind instrument except the pickup was placed near the reed so as to pick up higher harmonics to create scratchier sounds to be manipulated with plugins. Also, the next time you record say a bassoon or sax just bang your finger on the contact mic while they’re playing. It was entertaining, but from an instrument building perspective, meh. Personally, I found Reed Ghazala's work more interesting. He even looks more interesting.
Look at me. I'm a crazy circuit bender that collects mushrooms.
Now this is a home made instrument.
3 comments:
Ever the cynic but there is some truth to what you say. Would have been nice to think they also toiled away with Plogue for hours creating weird software processing devices. Don't remember that they said these were off the shelf VST's though. Do you? You can write VST's, as I'm sure you're aware, maybe they did that, but there sounded like a lot of delay and generic things. I did like their thinking re: new ways of interacting with devices to create sound. Maybe you can go the next step ...
ps: Reed is a legend ...
pps: Careful with that axe, Eugene!
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