What do you have cooked up to scare trick-or-treaters this Halloween? We humbly suggest adding in some type of noise box, especially one like this offering from [Paisley Computer] that uses reverb and other effects to achieve chilling, thrilling sounds.
As you can see, this instrument is essentially a bunch of doodads affixed to and through a cigar box. And as you’ll hear in the first video after the break, the various rubber bands make great drum sounds. The springs are nice, too, but our personal favorite has to be the head massager thing. Shhhing!
Inside the box you’ll find a guitar jack and some piezos glued to the underside of the top surface, but you’ll also find springs mounted across the inside that add to the resonance of the cigar box.
You can use either an interface and DAW or an effects pedal chain to really make things freaky, and [Paisley Computer] does a showdown between Focusrite interface versus various stomp pedals in the second video. In the third video, we learn how to make one of our own.
Do you like the idea of a spring reverb? How about a really big one that sounds sort of Satanic?
Yeah the head scratcher is genius
Why bother building one for Halloween?
Just play the soundtrack of the first video!
(I could never do what he did there!)
Interesting that in his DAW (Ableton) he used an effect from Valahalla just like the other Noise Box project written up on HAD a week or so ago.
“Valhalla”
Cool project, also, the song sounds totally like akira OST Main Theme
Yeah, I had to build one. :) Great Saturday afternoon project, thanks for the inspiration! I was gonna do a full-on writeup and song with it, but I ran out of time, so here’s a photo and an audio bit.
I hit a cigar shop for the box ($2 each or all you could carry out the door from their stack for $20) and then hit Ace hardware for the, well, hardware. I had the piezos and jack from a drum trigger project.
There are five 1.5″ piezos, two on top, one on each side, one on the front. My intention was to add a baby kalimba to each side of the front panel, and volume pots for each pickup to “tune” it – which turned out to be totally unnecessary, as it sounds great with the piezos wired straight to the jack.
The “kick” sound is me strumming the spring on the left with a guitar pick. Other sounds are either fingers going’ thump or whacking the rubber bands with a paintbrush handle. Minimal EQ on the recording, it really sounds like this. Other noisemakers are a Yamaha Reface CP doing electric piano and clavinet, and a weird free sample pack/instrument vocal-synthesizer thingie called Voculon 3000.
Photo: http://www.porch.org/hackaday/wardrum.jpg
Audio: http://porch.org/hackaday/wardrum.mp3