An experiment with organic sound

The last time I used a proper microphone to record anything was about 7 years ago; it was a Blue Snowball, used with a boom stand. In all honesty, the Snowball performed quite well and I was surprised how well it could capture a vocal. It did it so well that it almost didn't need any tweaking on a digital level.

ANYWAY... so my new DP-008 has a condenser microphone built-in to it, so I figured I might as well try it out.

I just wanted to throw something quick-and-dirty together, so I recorded two guitars first, then used manually "played" stuff to see how well the mic would capture.

I decided the easiest thing would be to create a beat.

First I tried slapping my hands on my knee, but that didn't work out too well. Then I tried hitting a pen on the desk, but that didn't work either. Then I grabbed a keychain with a loop on it, and when I rocked it back and for it made a clicking sound that I could control in time, so that was my "hi-hat". For the "snare", that was snapping fingers. For the "bass drum", that was me thumping my chest (I had to dial up some bass EQ to make that heard).

The levels in the demo above are way off, but I don't care because I just wanted to get this thing recorded to see if I could actually pull it off. And pull it off I did.

This is the second time I've used the DP-008's mic. The first time was with playing a Strat totally unplugged, but this time I wanted to record different organic stuff like keychain clicks, snaps and thumps. The mic picked it all up and did it proper for the most part, so yeah, it totally works. 🙂

You can listen to the track here.

Published 2013 Feb 5