Make it Thunder!

Spring Drum in the booth

I recently bought a spring/thunder drum to use it on the game project I was working on lately and I found it really useful to create some dreamy/eerie ambiences. What is interesting with that instrument is that you just basically shake it with one hand and it will produce a nice beefy drone, the more you shake it, the more intensity you get on the drone’s sound, pretty easy eh!

So, we decided with a friend to experiment a bit with it and of course record it! We tried differents things with the spring drum : shaking it as we should to get the drone, using scissors to hit the string during the shake so that we could have these metallic small impacts on top of the drones, then we did a few vocalizations in the tube while the drone was playing, we had some pretty interesting results.. I just processed a bit my friend’s voice who was definitely inspired that day to do some kind of dinosaur/reptile monster voice and that was it.. We recorded the sounds using a Fostex FR-2 recorder and an XY stereo mic : the Rode NT4. Here’s a comp of my best takes, enjoy!