Last week Andrew Mooney and I set up a bunch of gear to have a crack at some no input mixing. We’d each had a basic play with no input stuff on our own, but wanted to push things a little further with additional gear and effects and collaborating to have someone else to “jam” with. The gear we used including a couple Soundcraft mixers, a Yamaha 02R, a little Behringer mixer and a few boxes for effects.
No input mixing is a noise technique where you connect outputs to inputs on a mixer to intentionally create feedback. This feedback is the basis for playing around. In our case we included some effects so that we had plenty of scope for messing with sounds. Here is a video showing some basic no input mixing:
No input arguably falls into the category of gear abuse, but it can be a lot of fun. Part of the fun is that it is quite hard to control and know what you are going to get. At least for us newbies. The following video shows a guy who knows what he is doing who has tuned his feedback so that he can play more standard compositions:
‘Fratres’ pour console no-input (extrait) from Christian Carrière on Vimeo.
We recorded over an hour of our no input jamming, and will post some samples up soon.