I’ve been saving bottles for a while now and yesterday I had a go at recording them. They’re pretty easy to tune. You just pour in water until you hit the right pitch. Here they are:
Below are some very small excerpts of the things I recorded.
The first track has a little bit of normal bottle shredding. In the second recording the audio is flipped backwards. In the last one I slowed it down a lot, changed the pitch and added some other gizmos in the machine.
My idea of an exceedingly good day would be to spend 48 hrs in a darkened room fiddling around with bottles, mics and laptop, and drinking copious amounts of coffee. Bliss…
Anyhow, I’m going to get someone round who can do some serious rhythmic damage on them soon.
Then it’ll be on to recording cats thinking.
**Should have thought of this before, but I’m off to YouTube to find some interesting music with bottles and water. Here’s one that springs to mind. [no pun intended]
Hermeto scares the s*** out of me. Bottle on!
Very nice Mike, the second one reminds me somewhat of the intro of Screenager. I heard they used a xylophone made of real bones on that track! With regards to bottles, I had a mate that recorded some great sounds using large wine glasses, filled with a little bit of water. He then flicked it to start the glass resonating and tipped the glass to move the water inside. This produced some quite interesting pitch bending effects. I also once ran my finger around the rim (steady on..) of an old goldfish bowl (like people do with wine glasses) and it produced a really great, rich, resonant tone. I’ve yet to include it into some music though, but it is lurking on my hard-drive in waiting…
Origin is one of my favourite records. Interesting about the xylophone, didn’t know that. I did some recording with a metal bowl that does the same pitch thing you mentioned. Nice idea about archiving recordings/sounds for future use. Hadn’t thought of doing that. Ta.
Hey Mike, Been digging the site for a bit now. Have you seen the Pat Metheny ‘Orchestrion’ vid? Pretty crazy solenoid operated orchestra. He’s got some bottles set up too. Better than the usual one man band situation and no bass drum on the back and knee operated cymbals required.
http://www.nonesuch.com/media/videos/pat-metheny-introduces-orchestrion
Hi Jonnie, nice to hear from you. Saw Jesse in Exeter, he mentioned you know each other. The Metheny thing looks/sounds amazing! Did you go? Heard it broke down at the end :)