Day 320 / Wow & Flutter

January 20th, 2011

Today I was back at the office for the first time in a while.  It was nice to go home at a normal time.

As I drove home, I thought about my song for the latest Monome Community Remix Project.  The  deadline is tomorrow and I need to finish it quick.  At first I thought I would work more on the drums because my song at the moment is sorely lacking in a good beat.  But suddenly another idea popped into my head.

I remembered thinking that I wanted to find a good plugin for emulating wow and flutter.  Wow and flutter is term associated with the sound of fluctuations in tape speed.  I think the wow is the sound of  the tape slowing to a stop or ramping up to speed and the flutter is like the warble that you hear when a tape is playing back with slight speed variations.  I know there are pedals out there that emulate the sound but I thought, why don’t I just record the real thing.

An old friend of mine, Jon Sonnenberg, built something very similar to what I built this evening except he did it many, many years ago.  He’s sort of an electronics wizard and he was also my stepping stone into the world of electronic musical instruments.  He’s a genius actually and has been building electronic instruments since he was a kid.  His childhood bedroom had hardly any room for sleeping with all the broke-open keyboards and wires and other random stuff.  He had a bunk bed where he slept on top and the bottom was piled with electronics.  He lives in Ohio now but still makes music under the name Travelogue.  I definitely recommend checking out his stuff, click here to learn more about him.  (Shoot!  His site is down for construction.  In the meantime, here’s his myspace)

Anyways, he had taken apart a walkman and installed the guts inside of, what I think, used to be an electric can opener.  He then took slices of tape out of an audio cassette and taped it onto a piece of hard card stock.  When you dragged the card through the can opener the tape would make contact with the magnetic tape head and you would hear the sound of the tape.

Well, tonight I made my own version out of an old tabletop tape recorder.  I used a dremel tool to create grooves in the housing of the tape recorder to allow the cardboard to move back and forth freely.  I took most of the springs out of the mechanics I could see up front so that the tape recorder wouldn’t spring back and automatically stop when I dragged my card through.

I connected my computer to the tape recorder and recorded some tracks from my MCRP track down to the audio cassette.  Then, I cut out parts of that recording and attached them to the cardboard strips I cut from the back board of some art paper.

Finally, I brought it all into my studio and I recorded myself dragging my audio samples through the modified tape recorder.  I played my song along with it and tried to match the speed.

It was almost impossible to match the speed and pitch of the song using my hand but I still got some stuff that I thought sounded cool.  It’s a pretty fun device to play with.  Other than getting just general warble from the tape you can pretty easily create some DJ-style record scratch sounds.

Check out the video below to see how it works.  Enjoy!