Making noise on a budget

No, they should work fine & you can get an adapter for the input.

.

About the computer speakers: wouldn't that be significantly more difficult to rig than an amp? All the speakers I've seen have the male connector cable attached to it to go into the computer, so you'd have to run the sound through a mixing board or something.

typically, there's a 1/8" inch input jack on the amplifier/sub-woofer unit.

computer speakers are great too because they're stereo. if you have something that outputs stereo like a disc man of walkman, and you short circuit it while playing through computer speakers the sounds will appear in random places all over the stereo field. it's a nice cheap way to get to what can be a pretty damn cool musical experience.
the short circuiting part can be as easy as touching the circuit board with your fingers.

and just so we're clear you should NOT do this with anything that you plug in to a wall, but a discman or walkman running off batteries will be harmless.

Can you actually get feedback from a contact mike? It doesn't seem to me that it would be possible but I may be completely misunderstand it.

Is there anywhere I can cheaply buy a premade contact mike? I know they're outrageously overcharging for them, but since (at the moment) I only need one, it's not so bad, and it seems to me that building something based on a guide like this is going to be incredibly not sturdy (whereas I'm not completely sure what this guy is doing), and to make it better I'd have to have a soldering iron, which, unless I'm going to start circuit bending, really cancels out the savings of building it yourself.

http://www.contactmicrophones.com/

27$ for the basic contact mic, free shipping.

"Great for noise enthusiasts" as said on the site. I have never deal with them yet but heard somewhere on IHM that they can be trusted.

Can you actually get feedback from a contact mike? It doesn't seem to me that it would be possible but I may be completely misunderstand it.

Yes, with enough gain and proximity, contact mics will feed back. Ryu Hankil's current instrument is mainly based on this, in fact.

.

Can you actually get feedback from a contact mike? It doesn't seem to me that it would be possible but I may be completely misunderstand it.

put the mic on a speaker/cabinet and send the mic's output back through amplification and to the speaker. (it's possible in theory to use a piezo film as a speaker and a microphone at the same time if you can attach 4 leads to it, one input pair and out oneput pair. I don't think i've heard of anyone doing that, tho...)

usually, contact mics aren't used for feedback but just to get funky sounds from stuff objects, eg box full of washers.

Can you actually get feedback from a contact mike? It doesn't seem to me that it would be possible but I may be completely misunderstand it.

Yes, with enough gain and proximity, contact mics will feed back. Ryu Hankil's current instrument is mainly based on this, in fact.

make sure to check out this recording if you haven't already: http://taumaturgia.com/en/tmtg/becomingtypewriter.html . a current favorite for me.

you can definitely use contact mics for feedback. but you will need to either put them right on the speaker or attach them to something that will pick up vibrations from the speaker like a cymbal, a cardboard box, and piece of plexi-glass. something at least somewhat resonant.

if you have a radioshack or something nearby just go pick up a couple contact mics and hook them up per the instructions you posted. shouldn't cost more that $10, especially if you use as much salvaged stuff as possible, ie: jack, wire, etc.

don't worry about durability yet, just have fun. crappy contact mics can be great in that they will crackle and hum and all kinds of things when abused, which can provide nice texture beyond just making the sounds of objects louder.

you can definitely use contact mics for feedback. but you will need to either put them right on the speaker or attach them to something that will pick up vibrations from the speaker

Or you can just give them huge piles of gain. They'll pick up sound from the air, for sure.

also- I've found that pressing something like a needle into the surface of a piezo disc will create a nice continuous line of feedback.... and the levels don't need to be high either... so you can easily switch between amplifying an object or whatever... and creating yr feedback envelopes.

The amp came today, it's pretty great. And they accidentally sent me 3 cables so I'm going to try the homemade approach. But it seems that Radioshack doesn't carry piezo discs anymore. I hope I can find it in store, the only places I could find them online were charging like $7 shipping. Although it was $2 for a set of six, maybe I could just get 24 and break them all.

What is the price point ?

I'll ask that question again.
What do you have in your arsenal ? Do you have any effects pedals at all?
While certainly NOT a requirement you can do alot with a distortion and a delay.

I'm not sure, I don't know how much I'm willing to invest in this yet. I don't have any pedals, but I don't think I'll need them any time soon: the amp itself has built in distortion, and my digital piano has delay and all that good stuff for the keyboard input. The tape recorder is a good point, my sister's is actually laying around, but how would one use it exactly? Maybe I'm not creative enough, but I all I can think of is recording your hellish miasma and then playing it back so you can layer more on top of it. Which is still useful, I suppose.

But it seems that Radioshack doesn't carry piezo discs anymore.

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index ... Id=2062397

Thanks RF, but sadly I broke it apart when I was taking it out. I think I'm just going to buy them separately so I don't have to worry about it. By the way, while it's too late now, did it matter that the transducer was connected to a circuit board before the red and black wires?

Coinage, I have a extra piezos if you want some PM me your address and I'll send a few.

Coinage, I have a extra piezos if you want some PM me your address and I'll send a few.

Thanks man, that's really awesome! I'm not really a sports fan, but in this case GO SAINTS!

I know I'm a little late in my contribution to this thread, but my advice is this: don't worry about getting any new equipment and don't worry about trying out new computer software. Just take everything audio-related you already own, put it all out on a table and start messing around, hooking things up wrong and so on. Eventually you will stumble across some unique sounds which you get excited about and can use... that's pretty much been my experience, FWIW...

you can definitely use contact mics for feedback. but you will need to either put them right on the speaker or attach them to something that will pick up vibrations from the speaker

Or you can just give them huge piles of gain. They'll pick up sound from the air, for sure.

This is kind of late, but it's my first time reading...

Just wanted to say, you can pick up sound from the air, but that's once a mic is producing sustained feedback... via a high gain distortion, for instance...

Actually, it's almost like a ring mod effect, though the sounds are very faint, and the "carrier" (the feedback tone) is present...but the sound coming through, while faint, has a distinct "ring modulated" sound...

EDIT: Same goes for standard mics too, BTW...

More on-topic... when I first started messing around with recording (long before actually learning "Noise" was a genre, and even before I developed an interested in making "music"), I would sit on the floor in my room and record (really stupid) stuff to tapes with the built-in mic of a pink, plastic, 2-deck boom box... that, and I'd warp tapes (initially discovering the possibility on accident) to make them sound weird... I had a lot of fun just doing that!