insane music/gear ideas thread.

[jibberish]

heh. you never know....

here's mine:

THEE ultimate noise band rhythm-box. thinking of you mortay haha.

take 1 old clothes dryer.
strip it down to motor and drum
add speed controller to motor and envelope type of speed control
modify the paddles, both in spacing and in shape. some could catch and release at the top, some could deflect
thoroughly research every conceivable shit that makes heinous noise tumbling in a dryer and maybe come out with sets of stuff that sounds killer at certain speeds with certain paddle combos
FINALLY, replace sections of the drum with other materials for different sounds upon being struck by flying objects.

you are on your own regarding mic'ing that bitch up.


next.....

[RAGER]

I've heard drummers that sounded like a shoe in a dryer.

[sanovine]

I once made a drone instrument out of a broken accordion and a vacuum cleaner. I called it the wheeze-o-tron. It was dreadful.

[fallen]

Set up a huge PA + amps backline that supplements the house PA system. Hand out to the audience 30 or more unusual instruments that are all anchored via 1/4" cable to some kind of switching / mixing system.

The "audience" plays the music and the "band" listens and selects / mixes the most interesting sounds coming in, adding various effects and routing the signals to amps or the PA.

[showdown]

Speaking of drone...

[everdrone]

thinking of getting a $200 electronic drumset and tooling around on it and trying to convince a drummer to record an album on it   would put it through toontrack superior so it will sound passable.

[everdrone]

Gadget that lets my band practice in absolute silence?

Jamhub. Band practice would only be speech level loudness due to the singing. Any experience or recommendation? maybe another product or solution is better or there are aspects I have not thought of. But it seems like you could use in-ear monitors or any headphone and neighbors would not know it if you had a super quiet Roland V-Drums or Alesis electronic drumset. It seems like this is the only product out there since each user can control the volumes. Any comments/insights are appreciated, cheers

Here it is, I am considering buying this in a month or three when I save up:

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/JHGreenRoom/

[sanovine]

How loud and racuous is your band? I've tried rocking out with a jam hub type setup (using several mixers and sends) and my roland td-12 and its nothing like jamming with real gear. The lack of bass waves and overall volume means it just doesn't shake the room, which to us translated to never really letting go and rocking properly. Plus, its difficult for a singer to really let loose in an otherwise quiet room. You get a held back feel for everything. Jamhub certainly is better for ballads, soft jazz, that kinda thing tho

[Mr. Foxen]

I reckon the feedback won't work with that.

[everdrone]

thanks for weighing in sanovine, I really dig ya'lls music and tone ya no feedback and no 412s beating you in the chest and rearranging organs at practice

a curse and possibly a blessing, but no feedback to practice with.  I have an orange thunderverb 50 which has a built in "attenuator" and a roland drumset would be very quiet with triggera drumpedals or these kickdrums:

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/drums-percussion/roland-kt-10-kick-drum-control-pedal

alas, $500+++ and the singer I am working with immediately dismissed this idea since he screams and is afraid to bother the neighbors, he wants the practice rental room

I dunno it still seems like a viable option, though very unconventional, I mean its been out since 2009 and its not flying off shelves or anything so far

[AgentofOblivion]

I thought it would be really cool to have a wah-like pedal that was essentially your "gain" knob on your amp.  Not so that you could rock it back and forth like a wah, but so that you could easily clean up your signal or get extra gain for a solo...etc.  Who really has opportunity to stop playing and tweak amp knobs with your hand?  It might make a one channel amp more versatile.  I've heard it would be far too easy to introduce noise into your signal by having long stretches of cabling feeding into this critical part of your amp, however.  Patent Pending.

[spookstrickland]

The "Hydro-Vibe"  we were going to put high powered speakers under a saddle and let women ride it at our shows while we played.

[RAGER]

I thought it would be really cool to have a wah-like pedal that was essentially your "gain" knob on your amp.  Not so that you could rock it back and forth like a wah, but so that you could easily clean up your signal or get extra gain for a solo...etc.  Who really has opportunity to stop playing and tweak amp knobs with your hand?  It might make a one channel amp more versatile.  I've heard it would be far too easy to introduce noise into your signal by having long stretches of cabling feeding into this critical part of your amp, however.  Patent Pending.

I have one of those already.  My guitars volume knob.  Works wonders.

[sanovine]

I thought it would be really cool to have a wah-like pedal that was essentially your "gain" knob on your amp.  Not so that you could rock it back and forth like a wah, but so that you could easily clean up your signal or get extra gain for a solo...etc.  Who really has opportunity to stop playing and tweak amp knobs with your hand?  It might make a one channel amp more versatile.  I've heard it would be far too easy to introduce noise into your signal by having long stretches of cabling feeding into this critical part of your amp, however.  Patent Pending.

Some of the digital gear, like a line6 hd500 can do that. You can assign the expression pedal to control anything, including the amp gain. I have also seen a sort of expression pedal with a cable coming out of it, with a claw on the end. You clamp the claw onto a knob and when you press the pedal the claw rotates. I couldn't find a link for it just now, but it's out there somewhere.

[AgentofOblivion]

Interesting...  I want one for reverb too!

[MichaelZodiac]

The dude from Colour Haze plays Soldanos, pretty much set up a certain way with lots of gain. He uses a volume pedal and volume control on his guitar to control the amount of gain coming from the amps, no pedals besides the occasional Big Muff he used in an older song.

[jibberish]

I thought it would be really cool to have a wah-like pedal that was essentially your "gain" knob on your amp.  Not so that you could rock it back and forth like a wah, but so that you could easily clean up your signal or get extra gain for a solo...etc.  Who really has opportunity to stop playing and tweak amp knobs with your hand?  It might make a one channel amp more versatile.  I've heard it would be far too easy to introduce noise into your signal by having long stretches of cabling feeding into this critical part of your amp, however.  Patent Pending.

I like the idea of multi-axis foot pedals.

I was wondering if you couldn't use like blue-tooth or some other common wireless data protocol to control the amp actuator, which is right by the amp.

also, if you can isolate your control to a "control voltage" that THEN causes something to change the actual volume, your music signal is not compromised regardless of how complex the control circuitry is.  what I am saying is if you have like a 0-9v range with a pot in a pedal(expression pedal I believe) the 0-9v is controlling the gate or mechanical doo-dad that is actually changing the amp volume.

synths use control voltage all the time to make other things happen without actually getting involved in the sound path

I wonder how easy it would be to make a little black box to remotely tweak tube amp gains.
op amp gains = a pot on the gain feedback loop = easy as hell
it would be slicker to do it electronically vs mechanically, but mechanical would require no mods, so I can see advantages to both ideas

a stepper motor would be the Cadillac solution haha.  wow are stepper motors thee coolest toys.  I always wanted a good excuse to buy myself a stepper. I worked with them enough to start getting fun crazy ideas as I got the feel of how to make them do my bidding and learning the features of them.

[jibberish]

speaking of CV(control voltage)
what if I took my simple envelope style motor control and added LFO. get that thing throbbing HAHAHA

or find the resonant frequency where the dryer would like throw all the stuff, then chill just a bit while it settled down to get some crazy rhythm going

for real, I boned the motor out of a dryer, but that's all I have out of that dryer. the control knob/switch things are proprietary and useless for anything else

[fallen]

This is my other "insane" idea which isn't really that crazy, just no one has tried it yet.

Form a death metal trio, with some djent leanings, the reason will become obvious. The center instrument is a regular acoustic drummer, the left and right instruments are other drummers playing mostly pads that fire various downtuned guitar samples through some 5150 stacks.

I think you could actually come up with some brutal riffs if for example your kicks are a muted drop A and you set up the other pads to be various chords. It could all be midi run off a sampler or a laptop so on each song each drummer's pads could be reconfigured to do different sounds.

[Pissy]

The dude from Colour Haze plays Soldanos, pretty much set up a certain way with lots of gain. He uses a volume pedal and volume control on his guitar to control the amount of gain coming from the amps, no pedals besides the occasional Big Muff he used in an older song.

I do this for my bass rig, though I wouldn't describe my amp as high gain.  I just roll up the volume pedal to get into the grit during certain high points in songs.  I used to do it bi-amped, and I'd put the volume pedal on a 50 watt tube head running through an inefficient 215 cabinet.  That way the grit came through with some extra oomph, but it wouldn't eclipse anything else.  I'd get dirt out of one amp and clean out of the other more powerful, higher headroom amp.  Works really well, but a pain to transport for 30 minute sets, so I just run the one amp with a volume pedal now.

[black]

...take 1 old clothes dryer.
strip it down to motor and drum
add speed controller to motor and envelope type of speed control
modify the paddles, both in spacing and in shape. some could catch and release at the top, some could deflect
thoroughly research every conceivable shit that makes heinous noise tumbling in a dryer and maybe come out with sets of stuff that sounds killer at certain speeds with certain paddle combos
FINALLY, replace sections of the drum with other materials for different sounds upon being struck by flying objects.

you are on your own regarding mic'ing that bitch up...

These Swedes already have an acoustic-ish version.

[RAGER]

Holy shit.  I clicked on that video not knowing what song that was and it is playing on the radio in the office here at work.  Weird.

[mutantcolors]

Been guarding this idea for years, but I know it's safe here because of the high stoner quotient.

Complimentary bands often play together on a bill. Instead of putting together a show with one band after the other, work out a performance where both bands can be on stage at once, and trade off songs and play songs written as/for both bands together.

[RAGER]

Been done plenty.

[mutantcolors]

Examples. Go.