So here’s the second of my gems. The freedbacker. For all intents and purposes this is a somewhat failed experiment – in 2014 I worked in a really wonderful studio – it had all the great gear – Neve Console, Studer Tape Machine, and wonderful mics from the golden era of Neumann, AKG etc so I set about experimenting and recording some instruments. As a lover of all things doom metal, drone and noise – I wanted to try and create a chromatic feedback instrument – which I did – It was rubbish, it didn’t sound very good AT ALL.
And so it lived on a hard drive in the sound purgatory section never to be used!
Until years later, I found that one of those feedback loops stretched sounded amazing, something about the tension in the movement of the feedback tuning that I loved.
Sometimes a simple one shot sample stretched is perfect.
This is that instrument.
Since then I’ve used it loads underpinning or creating tension in productions or simply as a drone instrument. A recent production I used it in was Diego Philips’ 2020 track ‘The Sun’ – The Freedbacker runs the length of the track, with added tape loops and guitar swells over the top.
The amp used was a Lazy J combo, the guitar a Silvertone – mic-ed with a Sennheiser md441 in to a Neve 8058 console.
24bit 44.1khz
With delay and reverb on/off switches.
Kontakt Preset Instruments:
Freedbacker
Delay – simple delay
Frippertronics – A long tape like delay
Keep on Truckin’ – reverb taken in the same truck as our TRUCK DRUMS instrument
Long Robert – A stereo reverby version of frippertronics or tapey delay – think the classic ‘No Pussyfooting’ sort of sound. A personal favourite.
Reverse
Spongy – I was thinking a kind of Bebe & Louie Barron/Raymond Scott kind of thing
The Peter Criss Jazz – An ode to one of my favourite albums – American Don by Don Caballero & the chopped guitar textures on track 2: ‘The Peter Criss Jazz’. Nothing to do with Kiss, although they’re great as well. This almost sounds calliope like.
The Peter Criss Truck – The Peter Criss Jazz but in a truck
Truck Delay – Delayed feedback with our Truck IR
Truck Verb – Slightly altered Truck Reverb
