this is the thread where you ask: just how did they make that sound?

a thread for asking about odd noises, strange sounds and other sonic mysteries that feature in the music you love

like for instance the weird whistling sound in the opening few seconds of this song???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeMAR9xTV58
The Beat - Dream Home In NZ

and wtf are they using for the excellent solo at the end of this (2:56 onwards)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8lVMZXylTQ
Loredana Berte - In Alto Mare

That sound from the Beat song sounds like some kind of electronic instrument, i.e., a theremin or something similar?

I think it's a Whirly Tube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuGnsW0ysrA

The Beat track sounds like that plastic tube you whirl round your head, I don't know what it's actually called, which I assumed was completely a 70s thing but which is apparently still around

(xp!!!!!)

idk for sure, but the first thing that Beat song brings to mind is a glass harmonica:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzSraDGRg0s

oh, i thought it might be something like that but i had no idea how they changed the pitch. thank you deflatormouse and tom!

xp that rob scallon learning to play the glass harmonica video is beautiful :)

It's also used on a track by Family, but damned if I can remember what one!

the chameleons use it too on a track off 'script of the bridge' iirc

Loredana Berte solo just sounds like a MiniMoog or something similar?

aha thanks Matt! will have to try and find that sound on my model D instead of just doing the bloopy bass thing

Whirly tubes to the fore, Family, "Blind". No idea how Roger Chapman gets his voice to sound like that though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuzHiEW288Y

The credits for the Loredana Berte song on discogs include a thing called a lyricon, some kind of electronic wind instrument - could it be that?

was hoping to find a live performance of that family song but no dice on youtube. guess it would be a shitter to mic up? also wondering if it's played in tune but my ear isn't really up to that

the lyricon thing is interesting thanks anagram! found a couple of videos with similar tones and i'm guessing it would be more capable of subtle variation in attack than the keyboard synths of the time? so yeah, i think you nailed it

(xp) It's not very in tune tbh.

Is that a whirly tube at the start of the PSB's 'Being Boring' also?

oh good spot! sounds just like it

in the new ugly things some guys from the troggs told the story of how their engineer ran out to get an ocarina, which none of them could really play, because that's what they thought they heard on chip taylor's demo of "wild thing." but they found out later it was just a guy cupping his hands and blowing air through his thumbs.

Speaking of weird whistling sounds at the beginning of a track, heard this one on the radio this morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZA_i8JnE9g
It sounds like backwards bird whistles or something?

Not from a piece of music, but the head shake sound effect from a billion Looney Tunes and Hanna Barbera cartoons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICAtmSeW_uY

This sound is called a "trombone gobble" and is supposedly a tape of a trombone note played w/ a wah-wah mute that was sped up a geat deal.

Yeah, I was just researching that and wasn't really hearing it as a trombone at all. But here's the guy who supposedly did the original sound effect, doing the gobble at 2:47.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hftWpFnBDBc

Listened to the first clip at halfspeed, but it just sounds like a dying robot...
That 12th Street Rag seems like the headshake might be a realtime gobble then?

Haha, good find! Two clarinets at once, lol.

...plus, dude from I Think You Should Leave Now on drums...

Amazing. So it's just a trombone with no tape manipulation.

That sound Jimmy Page makes twice in "In the Evening" that sounds something like an enormous prison gate slamming combined with an 18-wheeler downshifting.

There's a lot going on there - for starters and uncharacteristic for Page, he's playing a Stratocaster with a tremolo arm. Just before blast-off he's got the arm all the way down before releasing it at the start the solo. I've heard rumors that a contact mic was placed on the tremolo's tension springs and/or the plate was screwed down so the tremolo could only go down. Page himself said that the crashing parts of the solo were a collage of different takes blended together. At least one of which is using the Gizmotron that he starts the song off with.

It's worth noting that he's doing all this in 1978 with a '64 Strat - one or two divebombs and you'll never be in tune again. Floyd Rose-style locking tremolos won't show up for another couple of years. You can kinda hear the sound on the the live version of In The Evening from Knebworth 1979 with the same blue Strat he recorded it with, but once he got a Strat Plus with a vastly improved tremolo system for the 1990s Page/Plant tours he's going all out into Kevin Shields/Eddie Van Halen territory. He sounds great here, though I believe being off of heroin is a bigger factor than just a guitar that can stay in tune.

Page really goes tremolo-crazy on Cadillac by The Firm.

Great post! Thanks for that.

Many xps - there's a whirly tube on Like Spinning Plates too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UAElLsVOQI

Composer David Bedford wrote and recorded "Some Bright Stars for Queen's College", written for eighty girls' voices and twenty seven plastic pipe twirlers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Nbp2ST4Qk

things you were shockingly old when you learned...

that squeaky monkey sound in brazilian music is a drum?!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J2WZGCCpEk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V2MZgDYemM

yeah the cuica! one of my favorite instruments and play this at my funeral:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy_npT6L7G8

amazing! was wondering how much skill you'd need to be a world class cuica-ista and i guess the answer is considerably more than i'll ever accrue

My favorite cuíca breakdown is Originais do Samba playing Tenha Fé (a Jorge Ben song they gave to them)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpPYEqbeznM
(around 2:00)

lol @ cuícas keep falling on my head

My mind reels at the wasted potential involved in being able to play a pitch-perfect cuíca solo... it's like attending Berklee and majoring in armpit fart noises.

what a dumb joke

It was Donald Trump, in the courtroom, with his butt cheeks

lol, amazing Cuica players can usually play the rest of the instruments in the bateria too.

At first I thought the electric jug on those 13th Floor Elevator records was a cuíca, or some other kind of friction drum