Sound Log
| Diary of a Sound Mind |
Introduction
|
|
Page
1
Page
2
Page 3
|
|
Conclusion
|
My brother had just returned from a trip around the world with an instrument he had purchased in Vietnam, the likes of which I've never seen before. It consists of a single string suspended above a long, hollow box, with a whammy bar on one end, and a tuning head at the other. Best of all, it has an instrument jack at one end...
An electric dan ban.
I plugged it into my tube distortion to see what it could do. It was a dream straight out of Spinal Tap. Whammy bar dives that would last a whole afternoon, and pure, plaintive tones that lent a unique mood to the soundtrack. Schwing! I recorded a bunch of dan ban tracks, and layered them backwards and forwards and at various pitches, to create the transition effects for swooping in and out of the chamber.
Click on the button below to hear the
final transition effects.
(12 s of 8/11 stereo sound effects-- 273k)
When I proudly presented the results to Bob, I
was cautioned against mentioning the origin of the instrument. Something
about relations between Vietnam and Bob's country of origin being a
bit strained... I made a mental note to check the international political
climate for next time.
Fortunately, Bob didn't recognize or seem to care about the backwards, distorted
dan ban. Instead, he inquired about the thumping bass at the end of the piece,
that was meant to signal that time was almost up. "What's that instrument?"
a company representative asked..
"It's a bass," I replied confidently.
"You might try a gendang there..."
"It's a drum.", she added.
"Absolutely. I'll get right on it."
That night I returned to my studio and poked around on the web for an hour,
looking for the mythic gendang. I finally found a 2 second sample
of a drum figure on a freeware sample site. I downloaded the figure, translated
the file, resampled it, SCSI'd it into my K2000, and created a couple of
keyboard patches. I created a rhythmic element and replaced the bass pedal
with the gendang sample, and, lo and behold, she was right!
Click on the button below to hear the
gendang.
(13 s of 8/11 mono music--144k)
