Vox Tonelab And Boss Pedals: The Many Wonderful Percussive Uses
Yes Grasshopper, you can distort anything... get a Vox Tonelab, some Boss pedals, hook up your drums to some contact mics, and you're set. Back at Chicago's Myopic Bookstore, improv percussionist Frank Rosaly takes us deeper into his suitcase full of distortion goodies.
In this installment, Rosaly runs his "cymbals" (actually scary-looking circular saw blades) through Boss Flanger and Octave pedals, and runs his snare drum through the Vox Tonelab, which he uses mainly as a delay. Hear the textured response in the Gearwire video.
GRETCHEN HASSE: So, contact microphones on your cymbals?
FRANK ROSALY: I have one on this saw blade right here.
GRETCHEN HASSE: Oh, I'm sorry. Saw blade, not cymbals.
FRANK ROSALY: Yeah. That's right, and this guy is going through both this octave pedal and the old standard flanger pedal, and hopefully I'm going to be trying to use this cymbal again as kind of like this sort of like a drone, either bowing it or using some mallets or something by just creating a constant pitch and the manipulating the sound with either the octave pedal or the flanger pedal or both.
I love the flanger pedal because it's just so '80s it's fantastic. It's so tacky and I absolutely adore it, and the octave pedal just kind of gives me a couple of different pitches to deal with because I mean obviously it's just octaves but that's a pretty nice heavy sound, and without it it’s a little more brittle because the contact mic is actually vibrating against the plate itself, and I can change of course by re-pressing my tape down. It’s a little less shattering.
[FRANK ROSALY DEMONSTRATING THE USE OF A SAW BLADE WITH A FLANGER]
Kind of a fantastic sound that I really enjoy dropping occasionally. And then I have a contact mic on my snare drum as well. That one is going through to my VOX Tonelab. I'm mainly using this one just as a delay pedal. It has all these other functions that I just don't need or use that often, maybe partially because I don't know how to use it but also because this is not a guitar and it doesn’t function in the same way that a guitar would. By changing these settings, these presets of like which amplifier I want to plug into, you know, I have all these different amplifiers and have all these different cabinets that I can use. I typically don't have the cabinet on because most of them create a lot of feedback. That's one issue that I have with this setup and contact microphones is that these are resonating bodies and these drum heads, when I have something like this going...
[FRANK ROSALY PLAYS A SEQUENCE]
...or something like that, that's making my drum heads resonate and that causes a lot of vibration and a lot of feedback and the less gain I have on this, by turning off the cabinet for example, it kind of minimizes some of that feedback though there are times where I really, really like to deal with the feedback.
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