Bottle Blow Pads
An otherworldly sound created from blowing over bottles.
ByStephen Gallagher
The story
Using a Sony m10 I recorded my children blowing over the tops of their drink bottles, one afternoon during lockdown here in New Zealand.
This instrument is inspired by the sounds from the 60’s/70’s episodes of Dr. Who.
The otherworldly alien sounds that came out of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and terrified a generation of children across the world.
Reviews
It can do more than you think!
It's not only a fantastically sampled bottle blow pad - it can also create some swarm sounds with the included options, which I really enjoyed playing around with!
The only problem that I found is that while there is a knob with the label "MW Vel" - which I assume means ModWheel Velocity - it does not work at all, it's not attached to the modwheel and it basically does nothing. You won't be able to do much with the wetness of the sound as well, but I guess that's the purpose of this instrument anyway. Very good overall!
Otherworldly Textures
As the description suggests this sound is very cool and other worldly. They would work really well for interesting documentaries and space themed stuff. I think it would also be cool to employ christians tremolo trick and automate it. This instrument has a nice air breathy sound that sits nicely on-top of the actual note and sounds really organic. This instrument is simple but very useful and interesting. The knobs on the GUI could of course be designed more interestingly but that doesn't matter to me.
Deeper than the presets would make you think
There's a lot more to this sound than you would think if you play through the included presets. Once you've reconnected the samples -- sadly this library was saved with absolute paths -- you might think that the "jam on" button and other associated controls don't do anything. I certainly did at first. However, once you turn off all of the excess reverb, delay and other stuff on the sound, and then shorten up the attack and release, you'll realize that there's a pretty cool random sequencer lurking in here. There are some pretty cool things you can do with this library then. I just wish there were more presets included to show the versatility of this library.