The sound of a dictaphone is known as one of the most lo-fi sounds of them all: filled with lovely hiss, flutter, saturation, wow and arbitrary pitch glitches. Me love.

The sound of a dictaphone can be used as an aestetic choice, listen for example to Hannu or this old Atlastop improvisation:

I own a dictaphone and now and then use it to re-amp and produce lo-fi effects. But I wondered if I could create a plugin preset that simulates the effect. So that is what I did today!

Here's the result (yes you can download the plugin preset at the end of this post!!):

First of all I recorded a small guitar phrase on the dictaphone for us as a reference. So here is the real dictaphone deal:

Guitar_Dictaphone

Of course I also recorded the same phrase with my Zoom H2 for a sample to be processed. Heres the guitar as it "really" sounds:

Guitar_H2_unprocessed

I then began prototyping my plugin preset using ableton plugins. Firstly I added an EQ and with the reference track I adjusted the EQ to peak around 1.74 KHz and cut everywhere else. Then an autofilter to simulate slightly eq change over time. For saturation I of course used abletons saturator and Dynamic Tubes. There was no real way of simulating the wow and flutter effect with native ableton effects, so I used the freeware AirWindows Flutter and Vibrato (Unfortunately mac only). The last and important part was to simulate tape hiss so I recorded a loop of hiss from the dictaphone and plugged it into ableton looper. There you go - a Dictaphone simulation! Here's the H2 sample processed with the dictaphone plugin:

Guitar_H2_processed

No bad, huh?!

Download Live Set (with preset)

The above Live set has some requirements:

• A Mac
• Ableton Live 8 Suite
• The Flutter and Vibrato effect from Airwindows

Unfortunately the plugin preset has som downsides:

• Mac only (If you're using a Windows PC you might want to check out the Wow and Flutter plugin)
• The Flutter and vibrato effect has a delay, so you cannot really use it as a live effect
• To get the hiss you have to press play on the looper - and unfortunately it's not possible to save the plugin as a instrument rack because looper does not save the hiss sample

If anyone have ideas to fix the above please bring'em on!

Been listening quite a bit to the Iron&Wine collection Around The Well.
It's mostly Sam Beams home recordings on his 4 track. Sounds great!

So of course I gotta try out those ancient machines... and it's as exactly annoying as I remember it from my teens.
Borrowed Raz's old XR-5 Fostex. It doesn't rewind. Nor can you record an electric directly, because it distorts the input insanely (in a good way, but not all the time).

On the plus side, there is bleed through from whatever was on the tape. So now there is The Doors playing backwards on everything I record. Neat!

Hmm... guess a cool retro style doesn't make up for talent.

Just soldered a jack on a 'Cobra' telephone, turning this danish classic model it into a microphone. In fact, I thought the mic in it sounded at little too good, so I connected the jack to the earpiece for that really rusty 'telephone' sound. Why do something halfway crappy, when it could be 200% lo-fi?

On the left is a cheap Aiwa mic which also got a jack while I had the soldering iron out (only burned my fingers once!)

Recently I swapped my Rode NT-1 mic for a friends Epiphone hollow body electric (thx Leo). It's particularly nice for bowing, since the bridge is raised and the soundboard is a little arched.

Been wanting to try out a modification similar to this acoustic reverb for an electric. (dig the '80 french ad style)

What I'm gonna do is shove lots of springs inside the Epiphone guitar, in order to create the same acoustic reverb effect. Acoustic reverb on an electric guitar... love the mismatch!
I still got a couple of piezo pickups, which will be wired to be the tone controls. So they will control the 'wet' balance of the spring reverb. The aim is of course the massivly, glacially soaked Sigur Ros sound. Alas, I think that just requires more talent (or an AMS-16, either one is good).

Will post pics of mod, whenever I get to it

I once had a bass with active pickups. A Washburn. One of those with that Buzz Feiten tuning system. Sold it to Haukur for cheap,... so that he'd join my band and play bass.
But I digress. The nice thing about this bass was the fact that you could play it by simply knocking on the wood. That would activate the strings enough to produce a rather pleasant overtone harmonic pad type sound. This was probably due in large part to the active pickups.

I miss that sound.... and I can't get it on my new Squier vintage modified J-bass (strangely enough, coz it's only half the price of the warwick). So I went swimming round the intertubes for a good active replacement for the J-bass. Of course that quickly became a no go, since sticking a battery compartment and preamp into a J-bass involves work on a router,... something which I have zero experience with.

Instead I found these pickups.... q-tuners based on neodymium magnets, which are quite powerful magnets. They have a much higher output and they reproduce a much fuller range of audio frequencies from the strings. Hopefully I'll be making chordal sub pads in no time.

Yes, I kept the old duncan neck pickup... coz I'm pervese that way. I like to combine the new with the old, shiney with the crusty, crap with the crystal. (and yes, the duncan now subjectively makes as much noise as an ancient neon filament!)

I have recieved the PAQ case, gigabyte mobo, cosair DDR3 ram and of course a Intel i7 cpu. Assembly has begun.

Funny thing to note, is the fact that my stationary pc is getting bigger and my portable is getting smaller. See pictures:

My first electric guitar was a Danelectro that cost me 89GBP including shipment. I had it for a long time before I got an amp, which most guitarists would say is pretty essential for an electric guitar. But missing an amplifier was probably what got me so accustomed to it's acoustic sound, so much so that I now prefer the Danelectro's acoustic sound to the plugged in sound!

I've always thought about putting a piezo pickup in it in order to capture that great acoustic tone. This is what I spent this my evening doing (with a bit of soldering help from Jonas, Tak!). The fruits of this labour can be heard in the below improvisation. Recorded with lots of processing and an Ebow.

danelectro improv
The guitar has baritone strings for the low end, but standard E and A for the high, so that all the strings are wound.

New tuners had to be installed to carry the tension load.... and the neck has been made fretless.

So after much wringing of hands I've assembled the Bogdan Box Bass,which I order from ebay about a month ago. Here are some pics from the assembly process (helped towards the end by Rasmus, with some soldering).

And you can heard it played here... bogdanBoxBassSample