Contact

It was apparent from rehearsals with the rest of the ensemble that I was lacking types of spinning, bouncing and organic timbres. I researched online and got the help of a friend in order to learn how to make contact microphones, then using these to make an old roasting pan an active surface. I now had a surface that I could use to make a whole new plethora of sound, some initial experiments lead me to realise how drastically different dynamics could be when switching between each object used to excite the metal therefore I would have to be careful when introducing new sounds into the composition.

After a scrounge around the house I found some objects that produced interesting sounds, some of my favourite include the soap wrapper which was especially good for creating a sudo "fire" soundscape and the pennies that could be spun which then created the "spin" gesture I was after. A few other items I found that were helpful to create "spin" gestures were two different rolls of tape that would both make spinning sounds of different timbres. All these sounds were originally run through the overdrive pedal in order to act as a pre-amp for the incoming signal, I soon realised that the EMP100 was much better suited to this as would do as good a job yet keep more high frequency content, something that was needed for textures such as the soap wrapped to create "fire".