Hi Folks! - I am out on adventure, having little time, but wanted to say thanks for the good words, and appreciation, and also to quickly answer a couple of the questions.
I considered making my own tongue drum, but reading of what sounded like very competent people having lots of effort and time and money into making something satisfactory - especially with the venerable "handpan" ... but making your own is certainly worthy if you have the time and will......since I have two of these tongue drums, the Idiopan and the Kaizen (from levijah, the Kaizen originator, not Arkman,) I can tell you through lengthy emails before and after the making of the drums to my specs and after receiving them that they are very complex. More than you might think. The Kaizen sound I have is after lengthy tuning and internal ampening to get the sound I wanted (less "tanky"). Propane tank drums are of thinner metal, and the overtones/harmonics mingle in oft-unpleasant ways making true tuning difficult (to the Western ear). The Idiopan has a mellower, softer, more tunable sound. In some ways this is easier to deal with....I can tune each tongue DOWN only with magnets about 4 or 5 semitones. The Kaizen goes down about a half step, but the lighter weight of the metal makes it more susceptible to muting effects.
Both are very cool instruments.
The signal chain on the B3 is as follows: B3- EH Talking Machine (only used in the outro part of the video)-Carvin Quad-X Guitar preamp - with a Behringer D-Verb inserted on stereo verb loop, recorded line in to an Akai EIE Pro (pos drivers-beware!) I don't recall if I used additional processing other than track processing with Izotope Ozone4 - I tend to, but without the session file here I can't tell you if I was at that stage yet.....I know I uded it on the tongue drums since for the video I recorded the tongue drums and my voice with the same mic (Rode NT4) and levels as my voice - since it was a video, the mic was masked out, but it was right over my head so I could get it close enough to the drums.
This signal path for the B3 is about the same as I have used for all the recordings of it to date. At some point I might get into creating a single-speaker behind my head with a mic on that also, but will likely record both the mic and the direct signal to separate tracks (being an ex-pro recording engineer, I'm a control freak - it helps me recover from my tendency to make mistakes, too...)
Anyway, this is me being concise.
Glad the video(s) was/were (will be?) enjoyed - laughing is totally welcome ... wish I could share the outtakes!
I look forward to more activity here, and with the theremin, after I get back from this trip.
Cheers, Gene
