Can you mod a spring reverb tank?

[Blood_mountain]

Hi pals,

Dumb questions maybe because I don’t know anything.

Can you mod a spring reverb tank? What would happen if you stretched the springs out slightly? Is there any way to add anything to the springs to change the sounds or produce something unique and different?

With a pedal like the Anasounds Element that connect to the spring reverb tank via rca cables, are there other reverb sources or just other devices with rca in/out that you could drive with it?

[adamajah]

I like the way you think

[fcknoise]

So the RCA outs on like this



could be going into like something like

[fcknoise]

professional photo resizer

[crochambeau]

What would happen if you stretched the springs out slightly?

Stretching the coils will reduce over all tension on the spring, increasing slap/boink factor and handling noise while decreasing over-all output. I find it difficult to try and describe the result without going right into the abstract nebula of mush mouthed sound speak and completely losing the thread... which is pretty analogous to what this will do to your cohesive signal and apparent high frequency.

I'd recommend playing with a tired and beat to shit tank, sort of like doing burnouts on already bald tires; but then you can cinch coils back together and establish another node, so: have fun! (and please let us know what you discover)

[Blood_mountain]

What would happen if you stretched the springs out slightly?

Stretching the coils will reduce over all tension on the spring, increasing slap/boink factor and handling noise while decreasing over-all output. I find it difficult to try and describe the result without going right into the abstract nebula of mush mouthed sound speak and completely losing the thread... which is pretty analogous to what this will do to your cohesive signal and apparent high frequency.

I'd recommend playing with a tired and beat to shit tank, sort of like doing burnouts on already bald tires; but then you can cinch coils back together and establish another node, so: have fun! (and please let us know what you discover)

Yea, I'm going to keep an eye out for old garbage reverb tanks so I can tinker without worry about destroying something super expensive. The nice thing is, tanks are really not terribly expensive to begin with.

In your experience, is there anything else one can do with a tank to change the sound? What about other devices to drive sound through?

[crochambeau]

In your experience, is there anything else one can do with a tank to change the sound? What about other devices to drive sound through?

In my experience, tanks are pretty optimized to their purpose. I may be guilty of a preservation bias though, as I tend to try and leave existing systems intact (read as: I have a pile of decades old shit that I don't want to break, not that I shy away from the pioneering spirit). So, I'm going to focus a bit on the second part of the equation here.

What about other devices to drive sound through?

Let's start with a complete sidetracking rabbit hole and mention in passing stuff like the Cooper Time Cube which uses a small speaker to push sound through a length of tube with a couple microphones doing pick-up duty.

Forgive me a moment of pedantic set-up here.

The above system, like the spring reverb boils down to five parts:

1) amplification stage to drive a transducer.
2) transducer (consuming electrical energy to create mechanical force or zones of high/low pressure)
3) delay line, or any object or medium through which the mechanical/acoustic force can travel
2) transducer (producing electrical energy as a result of mechanical force or changes in pressure)
1) amplification stage to fortify the signal into something ample enough to hold its own with respect the rest of the mayhem you've got going on at any given time.

Cool, so the reverb spring produces rotational force or side to side wiggle (being that it is moored on one end of the transducer that's the limit of non-destructive movement available) that subsequently wiggles a magnet inside of a winding to induce current.

That particular driver set-up is difficult to DIY, but thankfully we've got stuff like tactile transducers or small speakers to work with. These can interface with a Slinky, sheetmetal, hoses, etc. pretty well. Hung wire (under tension) also carries vibration quite well, and setting up a tactile transducer on a small metal plate that the wire is tied to can result in useful signal that only needs to be collected.

Collection transducers can be as easy as a piezo element clipped to the delay medium, or you could pull a "tin can telephone" and feed a mic.

Everything is really bulky and increasing lofi in my brain right now.

Something I've been meaning to try for a while is slapping a transducer onto a barrel of water, and then dropping a hydrophone into it; or conversely dropping an underwater speaker into a barrel or trough of water with a contact microphone on its side. It's the part under the water aspect that is slowing my brain enough to keep it on the drawing board beneath piles of other shit.

Anyway, the point of my rambling post is that all these amount to little more than five components, many of which most of us already have. Headphone amplifier stages drive most anything, and any gain pedal is usually enough to make the small signals big again. From there it's just stuff and shit. Piezos and exciters can fill in the blanks.

As an aside, one of the "transducer domain change" experiments I intend on doing before I die is to mount a compression driver or speaker in place of a carburetor on some old engine, plumb the spark plug holes and exhaust ports into some varied mess of tubing that interfaces with a variety of collection transducers, and then turn the engine slowly with an electrical motor while blasting sound into the intake manifold. I figure it will be a terribly heavy, lossy, and fun modulator of some sort that I will hurt myself with while hauling it to a gig.

Hope that helps!

[retinal orbita]

So you want to fill the tank with nails or some kind of other metal to make horrible sounds? I like it quite a bit!!

[Blood_mountain]

In your experience, is there anything else one can do with a tank to change the sound? What about other devices to drive sound through?

In my experience, tanks are pretty optimized to their purpose. I may be guilty of a preservation bias though, as I tend to try and leave existing systems intact (read as: I have a pile of decades old shit that I don't want to break, not that I shy away from the pioneering spirit). So, I'm going to focus a bit on the second part of the equation here.

What about other devices to drive sound through?

Let's start with a complete sidetracking rabbit hole and mention in passing stuff like the Cooper Time Cube which uses a small speaker to push sound through a length of tube with a couple microphones doing pick-up duty.

Forgive me a moment of pedantic set-up here.

The above system, like the spring reverb boils down to five parts:

1) amplification stage to drive a transducer.
2) transducer (consuming electrical energy to create mechanical force or zones of high/low pressure)
3) delay line, or any object or medium through which the mechanical/acoustic force can travel
2) transducer (producing electrical energy as a result of mechanical force or changes in pressure)
1) amplification stage to fortify the signal into something ample enough to hold its own with respect the rest of the mayhem you've got going on at any given time.

Cool, so the reverb spring produces rotational force or side to side wiggle (being that it is moored on one end of the transducer that's the limit of non-destructive movement available) that subsequently wiggles a magnet inside of a winding to induce current.

That particular driver set-up is difficult to DIY, but thankfully we've got stuff like tactile transducers or small speakers to work with. These can interface with a Slinky, sheetmetal, hoses, etc. pretty well. Hung wire (under tension) also carries vibration quite well, and setting up a tactile transducer on a small metal plate that the wire is tied to can result in useful signal that only needs to be collected.

Collection transducers can be as easy as a piezo element clipped to the delay medium, or you could pull a "tin can telephone" and feed a mic.

Everything is really bulky and increasing lofi in my brain right now.

Something I've been meaning to try for a while is slapping a transducer onto a barrel of water, and then dropping a hydrophone into it; or conversely dropping an underwater speaker into a barrel or trough of water with a contact microphone on its side. It's the part under the water aspect that is slowing my brain enough to keep it on the drawing board beneath piles of other shit.

Anyway, the point of my rambling post is that all these amount to little more than five components, many of which most of us already have. Headphone amplifier stages drive most anything, and any gain pedal is usually enough to make the small signals big again. From there it's just stuff and shit. Piezos and exciters can fill in the blanks.

As an aside, one of the "transducer domain change" experiments I intend on doing before I die is to mount a compression driver or speaker in place of a carburetor on some old engine, plumb the spark plug holes and exhaust ports into some varied mess of tubing that interfaces with a variety of collection transducers, and then turn the engine slowly with an electrical motor while blasting sound into the intake manifold. I figure it will be a terribly heavy, lossy, and fun modulator of some sort that I will hurt myself with while hauling it to a gig.

Hope that helps!

Holy smokes, thanks for the detailed explanation!

[D Rock]

I think you would have a hard time running anything other than the reverb tank with a pedal/preamp like that. They are typically matched to impedance so you can only use a certain ohm impedance of reverb tank. You could certainly do things to the springs, such as foam, marbles, paper clips, anything really, or use them for more percussive elements. I would love to put a reverb driver on a breadboard and work with gain stages and putting some unique fuzzes before and/or after the reverb. There are surely more sounds out there to explore. Check out the surfybear reverb. You can get a kit for ~100 dollars for a fender reverb kit and that drives a few different styles of reverb tank. It does take minimal soldering but that is something you can figure out in 15 minutes on youtube and a minimal investment if you don't already know how to do such things.

Best of luck!!

[Blood_mountain]

I think you would have a hard time running anything other than the reverb tank with a pedal/preamp like that. They are typically matched to impedance so you can only use a certain ohm impedance of reverb tank. You could certainly do things to the springs, such as foam, marbles, paper clips, anything really, or use them for more percussive elements. I would love to put a reverb driver on a breadboard and work with gain stages and putting some unique fuzzes before and/or after the reverb. There are surely more sounds out there to explore. Check out the surfybear reverb. You can get a kit for ~100 dollars for a fender reverb kit and that drives a few different styles of reverb tank. It does take minimal soldering but that is something you can figure out in 15 minutes on youtube and a minimal investment if you don't already know how to do such things.

Best of luck!!

I’m wondering, what would happen if the springs were not inside a tank? What if they were free moving, and could be wobbled around, stretched, compressed, etc?

[oldangelmidnight]

This thing has them exposed for your pleasure.
Knas Ekdahl Moisturizer

[Blood_mountain]

This thing has them exposed for your pleasure.
Knas Ekdahl Moisturizer

Very cool! Can you change the length of the spring with this? I’ll look into it more!

[UglyCasanova]

This is basically a modded spring reverb tank

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDrJR52nQFo/

On this contraption, the bottom left knob let's you adjust the impedance a little. Around 10 somewhere on the dial is "ideal impedance". As I adjust it higher (or lower) the reverb sound gets slightly detuned (and you get a longer reverb sound and some more noise as the input gain increases). It's not changed by a whole lot, but enough to make it a bit ugly sounding and interesting, at least in my book.

Edit: I'll shoot a cleaner video with a more abrupt sound going into it so you can hear it better.

edit edit:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOkVAzmNBbg[/youtube]

[Blood_mountain]

This is basically a modded spring reverb tank

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDrJR52nQFo/

On this contraption, the bottom left knob let's you adjust the impedance a little. Around 10 somewhere on the dial is "ideal impedance". As I adjust it higher (or lower) the reverb sound gets slightly detuned (and you get a longer reverb sound and some more noise as the input gain increases). It's not changed by a whole lot, but enough to make it a bit ugly sounding and interesting, at least in my book.

Edit: I'll shoot a cleaner video with a more abrupt sound going into it so you can hear it better.

edit edit:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOkVAzmNBbg[/youtube]

I saw this on IG! Very exciting!

Will you be doing a production run of these?