Earlier this week, we received an Eventide Timefactor for future review (give it a week), and I volunteered to take it home and get to know it a little better. Preparing for an intimate evening with this encompassing delay machine, I brought it back to my apartment to find my band's drummer (and not-so-coincidentally my roommate) air drumming to Moving Pictures in the living room. He accidentally struck a glass of water sitting on the coffee table and inspiration ensued, resulting in the mp3 attached to this article.

For the first tracks, I filled two wine glasses with water (one nearly full, the other nearly empty), and recorded one take of "singing wine glass" with each glass. For those of you who never played with your kitchenware, this is achieved by dipping your finger in water (or oil) and running it around the circumference of the wine glass' rim while holding it no higher than the stem.

The volume of the singing wine glasses really needed to be amplified to provide a strong signal through a condenser mic, so I would not recommend using your nicest microphone for any water-related recording. Thus, I dusted off an MXL 990 and was on my way. The thunderous pops in the recording below occurred whenever I accidentally bumped the shock mount with the wine glasses, and using an on-board reverb contained in my multitrack recorder (Tascam 2488MKII), I was able to shape the stretched out hum of the wine glass into something that sounded very synth-like.

Next, after filling all of our water glasses with varying heights of water, my drummer designed a "14-piece kit" on our coffee table. I positioned the MXL 990 as an overhead mic, and my skeptical drummer almost wanted to chip at our drinking glasses with his drum sticks, afraid that lighter materials would not be loud enough. Eventually, we settled on two sticks of incense, preferring the sharper attack of a thinner, wooden device over that of silverware. This was a happy accident; you can hear some of the incense falling off the sticks and splashing with a fizz in the water after some stick hits.

Everything else is just two guitar tracks through the Timefactor directly into the Tascam's instrument level input. This track should give you an idea of what to expect from the Timefactor, though a more in-depth review of the untapped multitudinousity of tones and parameters is coming right up.

Nevertheless, though this may be a compositional nightmare, there are definitely ways around digital plugins, depressingly expensive hardware wish lists and wasting time in a recording studio tone questing on unfamiliar equipment.