A request for advice\assistance...

I don't know much about circuit bending/building devices. My limited experience is basically helping friends modify cheap childrens toys they bought in Chinatown by advancing leads with alligator clips from place to place and seeing how it messes with the sounds when you push the button. I know that's not very helpful.

A variety of noise?
Tan as Fuck "Heavier Than Excitement"
Double Leopards "Live @ 1000 Strings"
Sixteen Bitch Pile-Up "They Went Extinct"
The Dead C "Whitehouse"
Wilt "Radio 1940"
Kites "Royal Paint..."
anything by Newton
Ceylon Mange "The Dirt Drinkers"
Dead Machines "Myster Of The Fall-Off Islands"
Hair Police "Rattler's Echo"

God I love the 3Ds though. Now I'm gonna have to put them on my to-listen-to pile. ILX always makes me put stuff back in my to-listen-to pile. I never have to make up my own mind about what I want to pull out of the stacks. Thanks, Kevin!

If you want 10 that are kind of like rocking noise but not NOIZE ROCK , mine would be something like

Merzbow - Rainbow Electronics II
Voice Crack - Earflash
Nihilist Spasm Band - No Record
Jim O' Rourke - Happy Days
Kevin Drumm - Kevin Drumm
Hijo Kaidan - Tapes
Pat Metheny - Zero Tolerance for Silence
Allan Bryant - Space Guitars
Fennesz - Endless Summer
David Tudor - Three Works for Live Electronics

those are just three off the top of my head where rhythmic propulsion is a big component of the overall bllleeeeaaarrrrgh.

are you from the NZ?

I was reading the other day about 'Rough Music', which as olde form of noise. (Relatd to the French CHarivari). Anyway, when people had annoyed the community, usually by transgressing 'sexual morality' in some way, all the townspeople would get together and march areound making as much noise as possible - banging pots, blowing whistles etc. I thought it was kind of interesting.

Jon - I'm enjoying that program. It's kind of bewildering, especially because I haven't programmed since school, but it does look neat.

noisey noise:

1. Half Japanese 1/2 Gentlemen, Not Beasts Armageddon
2. Airway Live At Lace LAFMS
3. Boy Dirt Car Heatrig Lexicon Devil
4. M. Brinkman Transmittens Vermiform
5. Mammal Double Nature SNSE
6. Peach Of Immortality Talking Heads '77
7. Gate Golden IMD
8. Quintron I.F. 001-011 Bulb
9. Volvox The Damage Begins At The Mouth Dual Plover

How to play Guitar
by David Fair

I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.

Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.

Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.

The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.

http://www.earache.com/news_stories/morbid_angel/JULIYA.JPG

i would only go the circuit-bending route if you enjoyed messing with electronics. same goes for any software or any other instrument.

good rule of thumb is not to cause yourself so much annoyance as to stop from creating something. (well, unless you're going for awkward silence and audience booing as music... which may fit in with the rough music concept, which is neat btw. thanks for the tidbit.)
m.

I've been building electronics sound makers for the past 6 months now. I went into it with only a fairly introductory college education in electronics circuit design (computer science stuff). A lot can be learned from resources online. Pedal builders have sites that have good beginners instructions for things like distortion pedals. Even if you don't have any idea what you're doing, you can follow the directions and construct a starters pedal. Just be prepared to screw up along the way. But it's really easy to print circuit boards, solder components, etc if you're willing to try and don't get intimidated.

Lately I've been constructing a bunch of tone sprites to play around with. I took a design for a morse code signal generator and modified it for line out instead of a small speaker. These things have only 1 frequency knob, volume knob, 1/4" out and fit into an aluminum case the size of a pack of cigarettes. I also modified an extra outboard switch to turn it off and on. But this is an aside. I'm doing this now coming from absolutely 0 experience six months ago.

Tone bending is really easy, but can be time consuming.

All of this seems pretty secondary though. Devote yourself to finding the sounds you want (constructed by hand, found in a pawn shop or otherwise) and you'll do fine.

oh whoops -- hahaha. I'm really not a huge fiction guy I admit. He sounds intriguing though, so duly noted.

Yeah, jack -- Airway rules!! I actually thought of them when I was making my list. but I was too lazy to go and get out the LAFMS box and look up the name of the Airway records. But they are truly amazing. What a sound.

http://www.emusic.com/album/10591/10591666.html

Anyway, thanks for all the advice. I guess I need to talk to my bandmates about what they want to do a bit. I do use software a lot anyway, so I figure I'll incorporate that. And a trumpet, because that's what I play.

But can't do much at the moment, as I just found out I'm DJing tommorrow night, and such short notice is killing me. I don't have time to prepare the CDRs for people, as I'm too busy burning stuff for my set (broken decks). I was considering doing a noise set when I DJed next, but don't have time to prepare. Ah, well.

Also, what David Fair writes is the only advice you need. Ignore everyone else, including me.

wtfff