Hitting my Modular Synth with a cocktail stirrer - to create unique gongs and scrapes.
This was perhaps one of the stranger moments in one of my shows on Brixton Radio...
Real world to control voltage courtesy of a Mutable Instruments Ears module which includes a contact mic, amplifier, envelope follower and gate generator.
Specifically - I'm hitting the contact mic in the Ears module with the plastic end of the cocktail stirrer, triggering the gate generator. That envelope is then fed to the 'strum' input of a Mutable Instruments Rings Module which creates the gong sounds.
Later in the video I'm also scraping the cocktail stirrer over the surface of the contact mic, creating an envelope which is used to modulate (change) the gong sound (pitch, brightness and damping) as well as having an effect on some of the percussion in the track.
Let me know if you'd like to see/hear more unusual instrument creations/combinations in future shows!
▶️ 3Speak