FLOPPING OVER BANDS

Flopping Over Bands

I have made several instruments using bands of spring-tempered steel which are thin and flexible enough that, held at one end, they’re free to flop around freely at the other. You can see one of the earlier ones here, and several more appear on this page. In some cases they produce complex broad-spectrum sounds with little recognizable pitch, while others have strong enough steady frequencies present to give the listener some sense of pitch. Their behavior is often wild and unpredictable; the resulting sounds are sometimes massive and apocalyptic in effect, especially with the benefit of pickups which bring forth sounds internal to the metal and scarcely heard acoustically. For a fuller discussion of instruments of this type, see here.

The audio clip includes several flopping over instruments.  It will sound most impressive at reasonably high volume in a system with good bass response.

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