The Koma Elektronik Field Kit is a piece of experimental sound equipment produced by Koma Elektronik. The Field Kit is a device that is made for experimentation in sound which has many ways of producing sound, including a radio, lfo, envelope follower, DC output, and a 4 input mixer to name some of its features. You can also buy separate equipment made by Koma to go along with the Field Kit, which includes equipment like small DC motors and contact microphones.
I found the Field Kit a great way to source inspiration away from the computer, to do something practical and experiment with ideas. The Field Kit is going to be featured heavily on both Sound Library albums, in particular the ‘A Series of Drones’ Sound Library. The field kit can be a way to create many drones, such as using the 4 channel input and patching the inputs into each other, no input can create some incredibly harsh drones which would work great in the library album. For this blog I experimented with using a DC motor and a contact microphone. I taped the contact mic to the motor and layed it down so the motor was resting on the contact mic. I connected the motor to the DC output on the Field Kit, the DC output has a speed control which will change the speed of whatever is connected to it. In this case it changes the speed of the motor, which creates more vibrations for the contact mic to pick up on, which then changes the pitch of the drone. Here is an example. This clip is being ran through a reverb, a frequency echo and a space modulator. The drone is chaotic and noisy which works great for providing tension in a composition, I started resting coins on the motor which were then vibrating, changing the vibrations that the contact microphone was picking up, which changed the timbre of the drone. Throughout this recording I started lightly punching my table to create the thumping sound heard throughout. This piece won’t necessarily be used, it is just an experiment with an idea. I think that this set up could be used in the actual Sound Library, as it can provied varied drone sounds.