I think you've reinvented the tonewheel. This is kind of how a hammond organ works. There are lots of wheels all driven by a single motor with different numbers of slots cut into them. Each wheel has a pickup next to it which will generate a tone with a frequency equal to the number of slots x the numer of times the wheel goes around per second. So the high C wheel will have twice as many slots as the middle C wheel. Pressing a key closes a switch which connects the relevant pickup to the amplifier
I had no idea how a tonewheel organ worked until I read this comment. While watching the video, that exact design was the next logical step my brain came up with. I thought I was onto something, but I'm about a century too late to invent it. 😆
Expanding on that, one can think about the optical tonewheel organ. It has several transparent discs that each correspond to an octave, with each note engraved as opaque notches within a certain distance of the center of the disc to determine the pitch.
there are so many small details in your videos like the guitar string you play being the tonic of the background music, and synching everything audibly and visually, that really show the passion you have for these videos and i really enjoy them. thanks for bringing us with you on these amazing experiments of yours :D
I was in a band in high school, one of those spontaneously formed bands that breaks up after their first show. My other guitarist discovered he could get some wild sounds holding a cordless drill near the pickup. He used it to play a "solo" in one of our songs. About halfway through the solo the guitar started to not work so well. So yeah, magnets are a quick way to destroy a pickup.
Back in high school I wound my own guitar pickup and used it to try to pick up the sound of an electric drill - I still use that sample as a pad sound all the dang time, a simply gorgeous sound!
This is the stuff! I love it when you hit the fun, creative, cheap and educational Just a great cross section and the tones are ace :) I used to like putting a pickup on a long wire and scanning the strings of a piano. It’s a great way to get the chords to animate and it’s so cheap! Your channel is the calming place and btw you seem like a super fun dad !
This video just popped up in my feed, probably because of a less serious project I worked on last week. I took two vibration motors from a PlayStation controller and connected them to my DC power supply, allowing me to control the voltage and, in turn, the speed of the motors, which affected the pitch. I also built a contact microphone, positioning it between and close to the motors, then ran it through a phaser and distortion pedal. The result was a really cool saw-like sound. It got me thinking about building a synth where each key triggers a vibration motor, with a specific voltage preset for each key to produce the perfect pitch. Really nice video and greeat edit.
This is a fantastic video. The organ-like sounds you make are beautiful, even before extra processing. These videos are beautiful. Pure art. Thank you.
i love your channel so much especially watching take apart and refurbish or figure out these amazing things and me not really being that teck savvy it both breaks my brain and makes me feel like im somehow learning something
I don't produce any sort of music (don't have the talent haha) but I love watching these videos. They have a real Blue Peter (Brit kids show) on Xanax vibe, I wish that demo song was available, too! It's absolutely gorgeous!!
I swear to god that each of the sound you sampled, sound like a synth from the Fez soundtrack! This video is so darn good, thank you for your content! Much love from Italy ❤
Just purchased a Maschine+ and looking to do some auto sampling so...i went searching the internet for free samples and discovered the Decent sampler. Found Motor Labs free pack - It really is a thing of beauty! I downloaded the free VHS and a few other freebies by Venus. After all the free stuff I feel Im robbibg you guys so I will be purchasesing the ehire Motor Labs. A great tool for creating my fav kind of patch -- pads :) Thanks you!
When you mentioned Cameron I hoped he would turn this into a Decent Sampler instrument and what do you know, he fucking did. This community is amazing.
Great stuff. I used to do a lot of experimenting with contact mics or also broken records and record players on unusual objects. This is inspiring to get back experimenting in the real world.
this sounds very inspiring... very organic analogue waveforms! somehow I had to think of a novachord. as I child I used to play with such motors and I did construct my own vehicles. so this library is probably a must for me!
I love your videos. I would have never expected the awesome sounds you made with this, or any other random thing you sample. Your videos regularly make me want to get into my studio and make some music or at least record some sounds!
Built an box with an guitar pickup, kalimba keys and metal springs a few weeks ago and run it through guitar effectpedals! Great video, thank you so much 😊
yeah, holding things above guitar pickups is a source of loads of experimental fun. I used to use a dictaphone to send sounds, like speech samples, through my pedal board. Great for getting textures live
If ever a Nobel Prize is announced for "combination of musicality, science and love of the unusual", you should be the first to get it. (BTW great work of Venus Theory to take your creation to the next level!)
Perfect timing! I've got an old wheeled Arduino robot collecting dust that I was hoping to repurpose into something similar using piezos. Never thought of a guitar pickup. 😁
I love this! Can't help but wonder how precise ratios between the wires breaking the field instead of random bending could be used to fine tune the overtones. Contrasting the vibrational output visually with figures from a Chladni plate might lead to finding spin patterns in the magnetic field that our brains could translate as a synchronous medium between between aural and visual stimulus. Thus complex composite waveforms might be transmitted audiovisually that could synchronize pitch and color into a single spectrum of cross referential frequencies. Synesthetic triggers? What if you spin some mesh patterns of Penrose tiles across the pickup, or a Serpenski space filling curve? What sounds will a Nautilus shell make? What does a cycle of Mandelbrot sound like? What if you made a kaleidoscope using metal bits shaped in the Platonic solids and rotated it over a really sensitive pickup? I can't help but think the motor itself and its sound, vibration and field must be insulated to get the really fine results of the patterns themselves.
Amazing sounds from something so 'simple" Like in many ways, having the idea is the first step to some amazing stuff. In this case amazing sounds... Love your channel, it is so creative and offers so many ideas. Thank you for this, David... And what Cameron did, also amazing. I'll be experimenting with this stuff too. Just ordered an electric guitar pickup 😃
Great idea! Thanks for sharing! Please try putting different materials that would cause frictional disturbance on the wires just before or as they pass the pick up. Then try using rods of various diameters, materials and at various distances, with which the wires would collide. Then do the same but use a rubber band instead of wires and attach a magnet and even two magnets.
I've done this before with a cordless drill! If you get the right kind you can control the pitch pretty decently. I think it has to do with the PWM (pulse width modulation) of the motor for variable speeds. Check out the Ween song, "Pink Eye (On My Leg)" from "The Mollusk"- I'm pretty sure they do the same thing. Be warned though... it's probably the brownest sounding Ween track on that album.
The basic idea is like the motor synth, but I thought the wire-additions were a great idea. Unrelatedly, I remember being kind of obsessed with the sound of one particular one of my mum's saucepan lids when I was young and I wish I'd kept it.
What a fun way to make tones! Like others said, it's sort of the principle of a tone-wheel organ at the core. But the wire creations are sort of like an "analog" wavetable.
There is a whole branch of scien communication where you turn any kind of signal into audible sounds. Its called sonification. It leads to headlines like "this is how the sun sounds" or "listen to these two black holes merging", "hear your brain thinking" etc. Maybe thats a psth to explore? Especially since signals in different dimensions and modalities. And can be combined in newr infinite ways.. there being a lot of audio potential. Looking forward to sour earthquake video - maybe you already covered this.
I was hoping to see the casio keyboard somehow circuit bent and using the motor as source for some effect input. As is though, this was a very unexpected and nutritious video with wild sounds.
Motor synths are becoming a thing now because of new technology in electric motors. Those quad copters (drones) have tiny induction motors that spins super fast and are super responsive to changes in voltage. This way, you can build a CV-controlled motor oscillator that will work in real-time as a traditional analog oscillator. (No need to sample the wave form)
I'm guessing the magnetic oscillations for the first setup were from the motor itself actually rather than the magnet. I wonder if it would've made the same tone without the magnet or if the motor's oscillating field caused ripples in the otherwise rotationally-symmetric field of the magnet.
Another idea would be to use a flat piece of metal or even a spring and orient it so it’s edge will affect the pick up. Then attach some thing with geometrically radial spokes to the motor (or even something with a chaotic surface) And have it run against the flat metal to make it vibrate. I think this might be good for a cool bass. I would love to have a bass instrument that sounds like the fat wheels of Batman’s motorcycle in the dark Knight, maybe at the times when it turns or something, I forget.
This is something I've been wanting to do for years. But I want to add an Arduino or something into the mix so that you can play the pitch of the motor and hear it accelerate for a monosynth portamento sound.
A step motor should do it (same as is used for scanners and 3D printers). More precise means more predictable so it might make the end result less interesting though.
I was thinking about digital additive synths when you discussed all the funky harmonics too! That’s really cool. I wonder if any musique concrète artists used this technique when making their “sample tapes” they’d mess with with their machines.
A few days ago I found that when you hit the HDD platter it is producing an interesting sound with long resonance. I'll be happy if you try and sample it, Thank you!🙏🏻😊
also, I think we learn from Christian Henson that things that start out at a relatively high frequency make good bases when you slow them down. The I’m not sure if that’s necessary for the flat metal vibrator design below.
Hey! I believe you would be interested in hooking up a tiny solar element / solar panel to a pair of headphones or a recorder. Even LED lightbulbs, screens, neon signs and many other light sources have different sounds when light hits with the panel
if you were to spin the pickup with some offset (using two or four so it’s balanced, which would make a great stereo source), you could have shapes that are much further from centered and wouldn’t spin well, but you could also move it, tilt it, etc, or even have a 3d shape, which would give a huge range of timbres
I've been meaning to do something like this for some time, for some reason I though the DC motor itself would produce a tone if held close to the pickup, like drill and electric screw drivers do, but maybe it's too small. I've actually been making my own tone wheel Instruments using fidget spinners, which primarily make angry noisy, grinding sounds which I like but I was hoping for actual tones, maybe I'll try speeding them up
An elegant demonstration of how a Hammond organ works.
tonewheels!
Look at Gamechanger Audio’s Motor Synth, for another interpretation of this idea.
I thought something along the same lines. It should be possible to make some sort of "organ" like this. Brillant.
I think you've reinvented the tonewheel. This is kind of how a hammond organ works. There are lots of wheels all driven by a single motor with different numbers of slots cut into them. Each wheel has a pickup next to it which will generate a tone with a frequency equal to the number of slots x the numer of times the wheel goes around per second. So the high C wheel will have twice as many slots as the middle C wheel. Pressing a key closes a switch which connects the relevant pickup to the amplifier
Came here to say this too.
I had no idea how a tonewheel organ worked until I read this comment. While watching the video, that exact design was the next logical step my brain came up with.
I thought I was onto something, but I'm about a century too late to invent it. 😆
@@pickyyeeter Nah, this is awesome. Still lots to be found out about this. Keep going!
Expanding on that, one can think about the optical tonewheel organ. It has several transparent discs that each correspond to an octave, with each note engraved as opaque notches within a certain distance of the center of the disc to determine the pitch.
there are so many small details in your videos like the guitar string you play being the tonic of the background music, and synching everything audibly and visually, that really show the passion you have for these videos and i really enjoy them. thanks for bringing us with you on these amazing experiments of yours :D
This!
Is this the part where I make a joke about being a *fan* of the sounds?
I was in a band in high school, one of those spontaneously formed bands that breaks up after their first show. My other guitarist discovered he could get some wild sounds holding a cordless drill near the pickup. He used it to play a "solo" in one of our songs. About halfway through the solo the guitar started to not work so well. So yeah, magnets are a quick way to destroy a pickup.
Man, I don't know how to put into words how beautiful you explain things and how enlightening it's to watch it.
Honestly If I'm going to buy this I might just wait until it's back to $30 Just to support you and venustheory for the great content you both make
Back in high school I wound my own guitar pickup and used it to try to pick up the sound of an electric drill - I still use that sample as a pad sound all the dang time, a simply gorgeous sound!
God I love all your videos. Crafting handy man stuff mixed in with super informative music stuff works so well. Absolutely incredible :3
Thank you so much!
Brilliantly done! Love the sounds that came out of this experiment.
This is the stuff! I love it when you hit the fun, creative, cheap and educational Just a great cross section and the tones are ace :) I used to like putting a pickup on a long wire and scanning the strings of a piano. It’s a great way to get the chords to animate and it’s so cheap! Your channel is the calming place and btw you seem like a super fun dad !
This video just popped up in my feed, probably because of a less serious project I worked on last week.
I took two vibration motors from a PlayStation controller and connected them to my DC power supply, allowing me to control the voltage and, in turn, the speed of the motors, which affected the pitch. I also built a contact microphone, positioning it between and close to the motors, then ran it through a phaser and distortion pedal.
The result was a really cool saw-like sound. It got me thinking about building a synth where each key triggers a vibration motor, with a specific voltage preset for each key to produce the perfect pitch.
Really nice video and greeat edit.
This is a fantastic video. The organ-like sounds you make are beautiful, even before extra processing. These videos are beautiful. Pure art. Thank you.
This is one of the coolest sounds. I first found them in Decent Sampler and used 2 of them right away.
this is the sort of absolutely fantastic TH-cam content that has been keeping me alive!
I love your videos. Elegant from beginning to end. Approaches sound with a refreshing curiosoty.
Really creative. Love how your ideas flow through your videos and how you visualize everything. Much love! ❤
I love your videos and instruments! Thanks so much!
Such a lovely collection of sounds and what a fun journey finding them. Well done. 🙏😎
i love your channel so much especially watching take apart and refurbish or figure out these amazing things and me not really being that teck savvy it both breaks my brain and makes me feel like im somehow learning something
That was the perfect TH-cam sales pitch! and a beautiful product ... downloading now .... Thank you both!
Very well done! Creative and very motivating. Thank you, David!
I don't produce any sort of music (don't have the talent haha) but I love watching these videos. They have a real Blue Peter (Brit kids show) on Xanax vibe, I wish that demo song was available, too! It's absolutely gorgeous!!
I only remember Shep and Goldie. Shep was a legend, but Goldie could be considered boring, I guess?@@artisans8521
@@artisans8521 Just had a flashback of the 1980 Annual cover 🙂
This is absolutely fantastic. Thank you for continually inspiring content.
PS: I learned an incredible amount from your videos.
I swear to god that each of the sound you sampled, sound like a synth from the Fez soundtrack!
This video is so darn good, thank you for your content!
Much love from Italy ❤
The work you do is important and so appreciated.Thank You For Sharing🤩🧡
Just purchased a Maschine+ and looking to do some auto sampling so...i went searching the internet for free samples and discovered the Decent sampler. Found Motor Labs free pack - It really is a thing of beauty! I downloaded the free VHS and a few other freebies by Venus. After all the free stuff I feel Im robbibg you guys so I will be purchasesing the ehire Motor Labs. A great tool for creating my fav kind of patch -- pads :) Thanks you!
This instrument is literally alive with textures and new tones from just the slightest movement of any of the parameters, great job guys.👾
When you mentioned Cameron I hoped he would turn this into a Decent Sampler instrument and what do you know, he fucking did. This community is amazing.
Great stuff. I used to do a lot of experimenting with contact mics or also broken records and record players on unusual objects. This is inspiring to get back experimenting in the real world.
Making me want to go out and sample everything in my house. Great video!!!!
Do it! :)
this sounds so warm and intimate
this sounds very inspiring... very organic analogue waveforms! somehow I had to think of a novachord. as I child I used to play with such motors and I did construct my own vehicles. so this library is probably a must for me!
ps: library bought! very inspiring sounds, love it!
this is lovely stuff.
thank you, david.
thanks, cameron.
How have I never seen your channel??? I clicked on this video thinking it was a Ben Jordan vid. Brilliant video. Keep em coming!
You are such an inspiration for many of us, I wish you many years of reward through creativity!
I love this channel so much! Every video is so informative and such a joy
I think I liked the raw unprocessed sounds the best. Are they included in the set? The processed sounds are interesting as well.
I love your videos. I would have never expected the awesome sounds you made with this, or any other random thing you sample. Your videos regularly make me want to get into my studio and make some music or at least record some sounds!
I was thinking about doing this, but not this in depth. Glad this was in my feed.
Wow, that flower shape sounded right out of an FM synthesizer
Built an box with an guitar pickup, kalimba keys and metal springs a few weeks ago and run it through guitar effectpedals! Great video, thank you so much 😊
the flower sound is amazing...
Fantastic sample library.
Sounds so much retro! wow! . Great content!
Very inspiring experiment..love it! 🙏🏼
The modulation sounds so cool
yeah, holding things above guitar pickups is a source of loads of experimental fun. I used to use a dictaphone to send sounds, like speech samples, through my pedal board. Great for getting textures live
If ever a Nobel Prize is announced for "combination of musicality, science and love of the unusual", you should be the first to get it. (BTW great work of Venus Theory to take your creation to the next level!)
I think you have invented the Hammond Organ. It has a series of wheels with teeth that spin, and guitar pickups.
"let's add some reverb" every time he says this i get SO excited
We need to pitch down nature. A lot of stuff is in the ultrasonic range. Imagine the hidden gems from plants and birds and others
This is masterpiece... very open up my mind
Amazing, as always. Thank you for TH-cam's best content.
Oh man, I would have loved to hear what free-strings would have sounded like being whipped around!
I wonder how using active pick ups or some of the fishmans would effect the entire thing. This was really cool and inspiring thanks David
There is a Synthesizer that uses electric motors to create the sound it's called Motor Synth MKII -it uses eight electric motors as oscillators.
This is so beautiful! Reminds me of boards of Canada
And can neistat videos
Perfect timing! I've got an old wheeled Arduino robot collecting dust that I was hoping to repurpose into something similar using piezos. Never thought of a guitar pickup. 😁
I think the motor introduces a slight pitch shift in the sample because it spins a bit irregular - makes it sound like a beautiful analog synth lol
It's a mechanical oscillator, what could possibly be more analog? :)
I love this! Can't help but wonder how precise ratios between the wires breaking the field instead of random bending could be used to fine tune the overtones. Contrasting the vibrational output visually with figures from a Chladni plate might lead to finding spin patterns in the magnetic field that our brains could translate as a synchronous medium between between aural and visual stimulus.
Thus complex composite waveforms might be transmitted audiovisually that could synchronize pitch and color into a single spectrum of cross referential frequencies. Synesthetic triggers?
What if you spin some mesh patterns of Penrose tiles across the pickup, or a Serpenski space filling curve? What sounds will a Nautilus shell make? What does a cycle of Mandelbrot sound like?
What if you made a kaleidoscope using metal bits shaped in the Platonic solids and rotated it over a really sensitive pickup?
I can't help but think the motor itself and its sound, vibration and field must be insulated to get the really fine results of the patterns themselves.
1:58
David: it sounds really terrible
Me: wow, what a nice dark ambient drone
Amazing! sounds so beatiful
Amazing sounds from something so 'simple" Like in many ways, having the idea is the first step to some amazing stuff. In this case amazing sounds... Love your channel, it is so creative and offers so many ideas. Thank you for this, David... And what Cameron did, also amazing. I'll be experimenting with this stuff too. Just ordered an electric guitar pickup 😃
Look Mum No Computer made an insane fidget spinner guitar using this same theory
Where can I listen to those 'every video' songs?? They sound so nice and chill.
I tried this with my electric and an electric coffee foamer/stirrer, and got the same effect. Very cool!
Great idea! Thanks for sharing! Please try putting different materials that would cause frictional disturbance on the wires just before or as they pass the pick up. Then try using rods of various diameters, materials and at various distances, with which the wires would collide. Then do the same but use a rubber band instead of wires and attach a magnet and even two magnets.
I've done this before with a cordless drill! If you get the right kind you can control the pitch pretty decently. I think it has to do with the PWM (pulse width modulation) of the motor for variable speeds. Check out the Ween song, "Pink Eye (On My Leg)" from "The Mollusk"- I'm pretty sure they do the same thing. Be warned though... it's probably the brownest sounding Ween track on that album.
Jerk did it on the song "Just What You Need" too
The basic idea is like the motor synth, but I thought the wire-additions were a great idea. Unrelatedly, I remember being kind of obsessed with the sound of one particular one of my mum's saucepan lids when I was young and I wish I'd kept it.
You r fantastic. Amazing. Thanks a lot.
What a fun way to make tones! Like others said, it's sort of the principle of a tone-wheel organ at the core. But the wire creations are sort of like an "analog" wavetable.
There is a whole branch of scien communication where you turn any kind of signal into audible sounds. Its called sonification. It leads to headlines like "this is how the sun sounds" or "listen to these two black holes merging", "hear your brain thinking" etc.
Maybe thats a psth to explore? Especially since signals in different dimensions and modalities. And can be combined in newr infinite ways.. there being a lot of audio potential. Looking forward to sour earthquake video - maybe you already covered this.
You did the thing! Been meaning to try this for a while I'm just terrible at getting around to ideas
Fascinating video!
I was hoping to see the casio keyboard somehow circuit bent and using the motor as source for some effect input. As is though, this was a very unexpected and nutritious video with wild sounds.
This is basically how a Hammond organ works :) rotating serrated disks next to magnetic pickups 😊
This is absolutely unreal….. than you so much for this idea!!
It's how a Hammond organ works.
Fun idea. I have a Koma Field Kit that has a section to power a motor and you can CV control it.
Your videos are incredible
Motor synths are becoming a thing now because of new technology in electric motors.
Those quad copters (drones) have tiny induction motors that spins super fast and are super responsive to changes in voltage. This way, you can build a CV-controlled motor oscillator that will work in real-time as a traditional analog oscillator. (No need to sample the wave form)
The flower shape sounds like the Sega CD intro
I'm guessing the magnetic oscillations for the first setup were from the motor itself actually rather than the magnet. I wonder if it would've made the same tone without the magnet or if the motor's oscillating field caused ripples in the otherwise rotationally-symmetric field of the magnet.
Another idea would be to use a flat piece of metal or even a spring and orient it so it’s edge will affect the pick up. Then attach some thing with geometrically radial spokes to the motor (or even something with a chaotic surface) And have it run against the flat metal to make it vibrate. I think this might be good for a cool bass. I would love to have a bass instrument that sounds like the fat wheels of Batman’s motorcycle in the dark Knight, maybe at the times when it turns or something, I forget.
This is something I've been wanting to do for years. But I want to add an Arduino or something into the mix so that you can play the pitch of the motor and hear it accelerate for a monosynth portamento sound.
You totally should! The biggest challenge would probably be finding a motor you could control precisely
@@DavidHilowitzMusicThankfully you can do that with the Arduino. Measure the frequency and adjust current on the fly
A step motor should do it (same as is used for scanners and 3D printers). More precise means more predictable so it might make the end result less interesting though.
very cool experiment
5:27 sounds so nice, reminds me of minecraft sound track
You know it’s gonna be a good day when David uploads 🫡♥️
Now I'm curious about pickups on a kalimba-like instrument.
This is awesome.
This is great
I was thinking about digital additive synths when you discussed all the funky harmonics too! That’s really
cool. I wonder if any musique concrète artists used this technique when making their “sample tapes” they’d mess with with their machines.
Fun fact: remote controls will create tones and clicks when pointed at a plugged in guitar pickup.
A few days ago I found that when you hit the HDD platter it is producing an interesting sound with long resonance. I'll be happy if you try and sample it, Thank you!🙏🏻😊
also, I think we learn from Christian Henson that things that start out at a relatively high frequency make good bases when you slow them down. The I’m not sure if that’s necessary for the flat metal vibrator design below.
Hey! I believe you would be interested in hooking up a tiny solar element / solar panel to a pair of headphones or a recorder. Even LED lightbulbs, screens, neon signs and many other light sources have different sounds when light hits with the panel
Thanks! I’ll definitely have to try that
i like how this sounds like the holophone from futurama
if you were to spin the pickup with some offset (using two or four so it’s balanced, which would make a great stereo source), you could have shapes that are much further from centered and wouldn’t spin well, but you could also move it, tilt it, etc, or even have a 3d shape, which would give a huge range of timbres
You deserve a peace prize
I've been meaning to do something like this for some time, for some reason I though the DC motor itself would produce a tone if held close to the pickup, like drill and electric screw drivers do, but maybe it's too small.
I've actually been making my own tone wheel Instruments using fidget spinners, which primarily make angry noisy, grinding sounds which I like but I was hoping for actual tones, maybe I'll try speeding them up