I have a cheapy bow I plan to use on it, yes. Been scraping it with different things. I have some springs internally to balance the load on some of them, this is not a strong box LOL. They bend inward if not careful.
I need to do a lid for transporting. The interior compartments don’t go all the way up so stuff spills when I carry it with the handle lol.
literally… do you need five different wizard capes? temu got you
been meaning to make one of these. nice!
Haha yeah, the first one of these I messed with was made from flimsy 5mm ply (I’d imagined the lighter wood would be more resonant, in the end I don’t think it really matters) and eventually tore itself apart under the strain of too many tight springs and other crap. I find there are resonant/tonal differences between metal/wood/plastic, but they all work okay depending on what you’re going for. Metal obvious has the benefit of not exploding when you put too much crap on it, so there’s that.
One thing I like doing with these that I don’t see much is attaching (or just setting) a bowl or cup on them and dumping shit in there - ball bearings, plastic beads, toy jacks, small chains, all sorts of stuff that makes plinky random rhythmic sounds I’ve found hard to capture otherwise.
Does anyone recommend a decent piezo? I mean what’s up with these?
They’re fine. It’s all mostly the same shit in a different package - like if you buy a cheap “acoustic guitar pickup”, it’s just one of those (or something very similar) in a nicer package, like wax dipped or padded or plastic cased with heat shrink and a real cable at the other end. We’re talking $2.50 worth of parts and half an hour of work. Super easy to DIY if you want. For the cost, fuck yeah, get some and play around. They’re a blast.
Interesting tidbit - hydrophones (for underwater recording) are piezo mics.
The problem with piezo material, besides being black magic crystals from planet Xenu, is it naturally has a stupid high impedance, like 10M ohm. That’s an order of magnitude higher than anything you’d normally find in a studio, so even with a really nice audio interface, you’re going to have a major impedance mismatch. A piezo is basically a capacitor (if you whack it, it makes a voltage), and capacitor (piezo) + resistor (impedance mismatch at the preamp buffer) = high pass filter. A real gnarly one because of the size of the mismatch.
That means soldering a 1/4" cable to the end of one of those and plugging it in gets you seriously reduced bass response, ‘screechy’ highs and a midrange honk. Probably doesn’t matter for some uses, but it is a common complaint, especially when using them to mic acoustic instruments, and you definitely are reducing your frequency response by just rawdogging the disk in most cases.
So why pay more for one of these? Because really nice ones have an inline preamp with buffered output so they sound really good and have a flat frequency response. Like if you’ve got a $100k cello you’re trying to contact mic, you don’t want to throw a $1 disk on it and lose all the character. Necessary for sticking in a shoebox with some springs on it? Probably nah.
I know Radial makes a DI box specifically for piezos (SB-4, maybe?) and there’s a ton of pretty easy diy plans for them on the internet. I have a couple I made in Altoids tins and I’ll attest it’s a night-and-day difference, but again, not really necessary for just messing around and getting sounds.
one of the guys I was watching used some cheapy DI/preamp from Art for the piezos, similar sort of thing. I also want. to say I’ve read that the bigger the disc the better as far as frequency response goes.
@wayne you can even find those piezo discs in triplets pre-wired to a 1/4" jack.
brotha i hella appreciate this detailed response thank you
the reason i ask about these cheapos is because i want to wire up my garden and put them around in the dirt and where the spiders crawl and whatnot, and was just seeing whether these are absolute shit for something like that. seems like they’d be ok
You weirdo. That’s a great idea. I doubt it’ll work very well because the output is proportional to the input and I don’t think spiders stomp very hard, but you never know, maybe they’re all wearing Timberlands out where you are. My guess is it’ll work but the output will be down in your noise floor. But whatever, it’s $5, go find out and report back.
Yes no maybe kinda sorta. Increasing the surface area lowers the fundamental vibrational mode, so you get a resonant peak at a lower frequency but not a change in overall frequency response. That can be good depending on what you’re recording, but you also get higher impedance at lower frequencies, so while you’re emphasizing a lower frequency with a larger disk you’re also increasing the high-pass filter effect which sort of cancels it out. tl;dr - bigger disks can help with low end, but only after you’ve done some impedance matching to fix the HPF.
teeheehee. yeah i am fuckin weird. and homie, this is california, spiders wear Uggz
My 18i20 got out of ADAT sync with my Quantum HD when I went to record something. Using channels 1/2 it recorded fine (but only one side, only using 2), but when I went to use 2 alone it was distorted and slowed-sounding/down-pitched. I wish I’d thought to leave it alone and do some sampling while it was happening lol but I was in a hurry and just restarted both devices to keep going.
Next time…
I had a MOTU 892 rack/PCI unit that would do the same sort of thing if I put Windows to sleep then woke it up, but it wasn’t distorted. Just lowered in pitch until I reset the sample rate