February 1st, 2011
Another late call time and another late wrap. I left set almost at midnight. Halfway through the day there was a little scare.
My co-worker Todd sent me an email telling me that one of our clients at Disney wanted me to cut a promo for the Walt Disney Company and it had to be done by Friday morning. This was very bad news to me since last Tuesday, I spent the night at my office editing a different so-called “fire-drill”.
It’s a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it’s nice to know that I’m wanted as an editor but on the other it’s quite frustrating when you don’t get to see your family for a long time. Later that night, I received an email saying that they canceled the job. I was so relieved to hear it.
As I drove home I tried to figure out what kind of creative project I had the energy for. I thought about this really inspiring project that Jared of Uprlip did recently where he froze a contact mic in ice and then recorded the melting process. That got me thinking about the concept of underwater recording. The contact mics I own have a plastic-dipped coating on them so they are completely waterproof. Suddenly, I knew what my creative project was going to be.
When I got home I collected up the supplies for my experiment, June’s bucket from the backyard, a watering can, a glass full of pea gravel, and a straw.
I started by recording the sound of the bucket filling up with water, then I plopped some pea gravel into the bucket, then I poured the entire cup in. I stirred it with a spoon. I tried striking some of my DIY glockenspiel bars underwater with the spoon. It didn’t work so well but I found I was able to get something interesting by striking the glock bar while dropping it into the water.
I grabbed the straw and recorded the sound of bubbles. As I was recording I began to think that the bucket, being plastic, perhaps wasn’t the best resonate body for my experiments.
I remembered that wobbly sound you can get by striking a can of coke and shaking it. I searched my car for an opened can of diet coke, usually not a very hard thing to find.
I dipped in the contact mic into the can and struck it with a spoon whilst shaking it back and forth. These were some of the best sounds.
Press play below to hear what it all sounded like.
Enjoy!
awesome! i’ve been wanting to plastic dip my piezos for a while, but i realized through my ice experiment that you really can’t hurt them. next i want to burn one and record the output.
Hmm, I’m interested in how would go about burning it. A blowtorch would probably sound like white noise. Throw it in the pan the next time you’re cooking bacon. :)