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I made instruments, Andre Louis made a video!

June 9, 2018 • Derek

From age 7 to the present, I’ve thought samplers were one of the coolest electronic musical instruments! I didn’t know what they were called, or where I could get one, or even how to explain my obsession to the staff at the local music store, I just knew there was a really cool guy on Sesame Street who had a keyboard that I wanted!

Fast forward a few years, and I discovered Jim snowbarger’s material. One of the episodes of “The Snowman Radio Broadcast” consisted of a tour of his studio, which is where I learned what a sampler was.

Skipping past some false starts in my sampling efforts, I discovered the sfz instrument format, and Sforzando.

All that having been said, I’ve been making several SFZ instruments of rather unusual things over the last few years, 2 of which Andre used in one of his “inspired by sound” videos.

As he explained on the video…

Watch the Tray has a most unusual history, and it begins in a hotel in Wales.
I was away for the weekend some years ago, and I noticed that the silver tray on which the cups and other drink-making accouterments sat, made quite a great noise. This was discovered purely by accident, but it lead me to remove everything from the tray and record it using a recorder that I had with me at the time.

Equally, the Apple Watch case has an interesting start as an instrument. My wife Kirsten had bought me a travel-charger for my Apple Watch last Christmas. You have to have an original charging-cable to-hand, and put this inside the case. To do this, you take the lid of the case off, and wrap the cable around the inside of the unit, placing the magnetic portion in the space provided. You put the lid back on, and the magnet is visible on top. You would then rest your watch on top of the case and it would charge. me being me however, I discovered that after taking the lid of the case off, it would ring for a very long time if struck with an Alan key, so I set out to record this one day when the house was empty.

Later, he sent those recordings to me and I turned them in to playable instruments.

Watch his video, enjoy the track, the breakdown, and join the fun by downloading the instruments from there.

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