Making a Musical Instrument out of a Sewing Machine

in music •  7 years ago 

Sewing Machine Instrument Steemit.jpg

Making a Musical Instrument out of a Sewing Machine


As a third part to the Manufacturing Plant posts, I wanted to go through the process of how I made a few instruments out of some of the factory sounds.

The steps to make the instrument using a single audio file typically go as follows.

Open Pro Tools.

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Drop the audio file into the session and find the best sound in that recording.

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Cut the front and back of the clip so that it is isolated.

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Export the file from Pro Tools and import into an auto-tuning software. Tune.

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Bring the tuned file into a sampler. In this case, Kontakt 5.

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Make sure the correct pitches are matched, usually I will have a piano sample loaded so that I can match it by ear.

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Turn on the Loop function to see how you could sustain the note longer.

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Change the start and stop points of the audio files to raise and lower impact of attack.

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There we have it, our instrument!

Screen Shot 2017-10-04 at 10.23.21 PM.png

Steemians, It's a pretty straight forward post but I hope you all get something interesting out of it. I hope someone actually tries to make something like this.

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So creative

Thank you! @kevteh

This is cool! I've sampled some weird sounds before, but never thought to pitch-correct an inanimate object like a sewing machine... will have to try that in the near future.

@heymattsokol It's pretty fun stuff. Sampling is pretty awesome. And the cool thing is that you can even get recordings on your phone of stuff and make music from it.

Well done. I'm thinking it'd be great to do something similar with the sounds of the industrial revolution. Here's a video of different weaving machines in action, as one example of the variety and rhythms:

How about an interpretation of the sounds of the industrial revolution?

@kenfinkel, that sounds really cool. Might have to use that idea sometime!

This is an addition to what I know about making music. Thanks.

@ejemai! You're welcome. This particular one is a fairly simple example using one audio file. I've made some sampled instruments with literally hundreds of audio files in one sound. It gets fun to experiment.

I bet it will be so much fun.

Awesome idea

Hi @jassarias, thank you! Hope to make more cool stuff in the near future. Might show how I made the percussive instruments in the piece from a few posts ago too.

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amazing job, thank you for this!

@mrkeyjano Thank YOU for coming and watching.