After lecture I made a recording with the contact mic I made, rubbing it on the fabric of chair and using only digital signal processing. Employing Logic Pro’s default amp modeller, delays and a compressor side-chained to a fast sub-bass kick pattern, I gave it a fluttering, tremolo-like effect:
I find purely digital workflows challenging, interfacing without touch control affects the way I perceive the sound I’m making. I’m a kinaesthetic artist, so working this way feels inorganic to me, almost regardless of the quality of the results. Maybe I’m yet to find ‘my’ program or ‘my’ plugins. This recording sounds like an alien language, alien radio chatter before the invasion. It’s neat! But, it’s clipping and I hear the unsatisfying process in the outcome.
Once home, I experimented with recording more resonant sound sources through the contact microphone. I included pedals to further manipulate the sound too, a ProCo Turbo Rat and Electro Harmonix Cathedral reverb. I beat a 20″ ride cymbal with the contact mic taped to it, rhythmically experimenting with the decay of a reverse reverb, a very wet echo and distorting the input signal:
The most exciting textures come when the masking tape loses his hold, and the contact mic audibly falls to the rim of the cymbal. I then hit it directly with the soft beater. It’s a seismic, explosively percussive sound, and the way the attack is so immediate and distorted is exciting. Perhaps there are rhythmic applications for the sound, in a transitionary, overwhelming sense within a composition. One of the most formative things I’ve ever read was David Lynch describing the half-speed drones and sound beds in his work as ‘firewood’. It’s not just evocative of the actual sound of his work, but a perfect descriptor for its purpose. It’s exactly the feeling I try to evoke; an undercurrent, the kindling that the composition rests on and grows off of. All while maintaining the consistent, hot core of the original firewood base. These experiments sound like the low frequency popping and cracking of a large fire. A mountainous industrial fire.
What surprised me about these recordings was how much more they gestured toward melody and tonality than, for comparison, a dry recording of the same cymbal made with the Zoom H1’s condenser microphones:
The resonance has a musical, fluting quality on the contact mic recordings. So much of the sonic character of a cymbal is its vibrational qualities as it resonates, which can be lost when recording with conventional microphones.
Further mining the idea of a musical resonance, I experimented with fixing the contact mic to the body of an unplugged electric guitar:
Recording through the resonance of the body and neck of the guitar, as opposed to recording through the pickups, caused almost all the high frequencies to be muffled or cut. It lends it a distant, subterranean quality. Paired with a reverse reverb, this becomes eerie. Through experimenting, I learned how different the approach of mic placements is when working with a contact mic, how important those unique techniques in definitively shaping the sound of vibration, rather than moving air.