DIY ideas – Use anything for percussion
Last week I was recording a song here at Epic Sounds that was just acoustic guitar and vocals. It felt a bit empty in parts and we had plenty of time to experiment so that’s what we did.
The perfect $1 shaker
First we looked for a shaker sound, not having a real “store bought’ shaker wasn’t an issue because my kitchen has a cupboard full of spices and other things to shake. My favorite shaker turned out to be sesame seeds in a plastic jar. I believe it came from the dollar store. Depending on what the song needs, try peppercorns, rice, sugar in plastic or glass jars.
I recorded the sesame seed shaker with an XY spaced stereo pair of AT 3035s with a pop filter in front (highly recommended). For processing I used BX solo with the width at 300%, a bit of EQ to take off the lows and very top end, then sent into some reverb. It was a great sound, but it didn’t make the final mix.
Cardboard percussion
Another thing we tried was a cardboard box hit with drum sticks. It was cool but needed a lot of processing to make it fit with the acoustic guitars and shaker so again it was scrapped to give us more time to focus on vocals. You should definitely try it, it costs nothing but a bit of your time.
Guitar case kick
And finally a sound that did make the final mix. We wanted a sort of deep drum sort of sound, but without a kick drum around or digging into the sample library we found the perfect thing. The acoustic guitar case! We laid out a thick blanket on the floor, turned the empty case upside down and tapped the top until we found the ideal spot (there is a ton of tonal variations on a guitar case believe it or not) and marked the spot to hit. To fake a soft mallet I wrapped the end of a drumstick with a guitar cleaning cloth and secured it with a twist tie. Recorded it in mono, did the typical kick drum EQ stuff and had a cool sound that worked really well for the final climax of the song.
Just do it
So the point I’m trying to make…try anything! Your favorite shaker of all time might already be in the spice rack, mine was. If not go down to the dollar store and try things out, guaranteed you’ll find something you can use.
Have a listen to what we accomplished in that afternoon.
4 Responses to “DIY ideas – Use anything for percussion”
By Ben Strano on Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
I have a twenty minute audio file of me and a friend walking around my old warehouse drunk hitting stuff. We were having a great time trying to find sounds around us to use in a loop. I went back and listened to it a while back and it was hilarious… I don’t remember doing much of it but the crazy stuff we used to hit thing was drunken genius… some of that stuff will get used on day… it must.
By Sean on Jan 28, 2010 | Reply
Peppercorns vs sesame seeds…the ultimate percussive showdown.
By Neil on Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
Great post! I did something like this a while ago, and one of my favorites was a string of coins (the 5 yen coin has a hole in the middle), dropped and dragged on a cookie sheet.
By Rupert Brown on Jan 29, 2010 | Reply
I busted out the knifes, forks and spoons to get a cool range of triangle/hihat type tink samples.
The kitchen is a sample gold mine.