Djembe with Heavy Effecting (OTO Biscuit)

YouTube Uploaded by FatSynthDude on Apr 5, 2011

"A friend of mine was in town the other night and we were goofing off in the studio when we started playing around with the hand percussion. He brought up using a contact mic on the doumbek when I remembered that I was in possession of a contact mic that I had never used. We taped it up to the head, sent it to the OTO Biscuit, and sure enough it was super duper awesome, so the next night I tried the same thing with my djembe and recorded the results. I apologize for my awful playing. This video was intended to demonstrate the range of tones possible with hand percussion sent through heavy effects unlike those typically associated with recorded percussion.

This video is my Toca Freestyle djembe (12" head) with the contact mic on the head and a dynamic microphone shoved up inside of it. For part of the video, these two mics were sent to the Presonus StudioLives and the onboard preamps were used. For both the head and the body channels, they were compressed and EQ'd by the StudioLives. The recorded audio is from the main outs of the StudioLives. The effects used (in order of appearance) are a Zoom 1202 (for it's reverb, delay, and pitch shifting), and a Digitech GSP5 (distortion and delay). For the bulk of the video, the mics were then passed through the OTO Biscuit (sample reducer, bit crusher, filter, pitch shifter, delay, waveshaper, step filter and lofi sampler) and into the StudioLives for mixing. Later in the video, a reverb from the StudioLives is put into play. Additional drums are provided by a Novation Drumstation v2 with sequencing done by an Akai MPC1000 (JJOS2XL functionality was utilized for grid sequencing.) In case you're wondering why I frequently rock the djembe back and forth, how open the bottom hole is determines pitch and tone to a certain degree. This effect is much more pronounced with distortion.

A Toca Freestyle doumbek was also utilized, however I didn't press the record button on the camera, so only the audio is present. This was miced up the same way as the djembe with the contact mic on the head and the dynamic microphone inside of the drum itself."