From the course: Sylvia Massy: Unconventional Recording

Finding inspiration for new sounds

From the course: Sylvia Massy: Unconventional Recording

Finding inspiration for new sounds

- There's times when there will be just an inspirational moment like, ah, I'll be talking with someone on the phone and I'll notice that there's a delay between when, when I'm talking to them and it comes over the speakerphone and then it comes back to, there's a big delay, so on the, one of the last sessions I did, I thought, well why not use this delay as an effect on a vocal? Let's try it, why not? So we just set up two mobile phones, iPhones, and dialed each other. Had one on the speakerphone setting and miked that, and the singer of the band sang through the other one, and there's this incredible delay. Ah, and you put it up next to the speaker and it, and it feeds back, so you can really control it. So, you never know when an inspirational idea comes up, and, and I'll just kind of put it on a list and I might try it later. There was a, someone suggested or someone told me a story about, oh, it was Ed Cherney told me a story about plugging in an a drill into the output of a guitar amplifier and then having a guitar player play, and it starts the drill up. I thought, this is crazy, I wanna try this, so, ah, on the last session that I did, we actually set that up and I'm thinking we, we might actually do it in the session I'm doing tomorrow, too, ah, because it's just, have you ever done a solo on a, on a guitar solo through a drill? Well, it's quite unusual. (laughing loudly) So I try to have fun with everything that, there's a, all kinds of things. We, we ah, I had an idea. It was just a kind of an off idea. I thought, well, if you take a potato and you can use the, the power of a potato to drive a small clock, right? You've heard of a clock potato? I thought, well why can't you use a potato as an audio filter? Okay, so we got two potatoes and we cut a speaker cable and pulled it apart, and then took the ends of the speaker cables and stuck it through these potatoes. And then plugged the, ah, speaker cable with the potatoes in it, out of a guitar amp and then, ah, into a speaker. So, okay, so we've got this potato filter set up. So does it work? Well, it didn't really work right away. But, ah, it was because it was, we were using a tube amplifier, but we found out that if you use a, ah, a solid-state amplifier, it works great. So we invented a new thing. It's a potato filter and what does it sound like? Well, it's, it's kind of okay, I guess. (laughing loudly) It was more fun just doing it than actually using it in the track, but maybe that's all that matters; it's inspiration.

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