I read something about Morbid Angel putting a mic into a fishbowl in front of the amp on the mid-era to later albums.

an old hip hop recording technique that was used when you were really broke, is to plug a set of cheap over-ear headphones into an input and sing into it, as a speaker and microphone are the same thing in principle but reversed, (mic turns sound into electrical energy and a speaker turns electrical energy into sound,) it sounds kind of shit, i've tried it, just sounds heavily filtered, but worth a shot for some unusual sounds,

The techniques Trey used just seem to be ways to get effects you would normally get with other gear.... By setting up a fan in front of your cab you're just getting a lot of extra noise and a tremelo effect, you're not reinventing the way a guitar sounds

As you say neither technique seems like it would do anything you couldn't achieve via a tremolo, reverb or eq/filtering.
Trey has never given me the impression he has much technical knowledge in what he does but it looks kinda fun.

I read one about putting the headstock of a bass guitar against a door and then just micing the door.

the headphones as mic is fairly common technique. It is widely used with speakers in front of kickdrums for some extra bass frequencies. Easy to make yourself if you've got a spare speaker and XLR cable.

Not really unusual or anything but I like the drumsound they got on Queens of the stoneage - Songs for the deaf. Which was done in 2 seperate takes, first the actual drums, then the cymbals.

I heard mention that Varg did something along this line to record vocals for early Burzum releases, dont know how true this is.

Put a digital camera down right next to your amp and have it record a video, although it's only purpose is just capturing the audio from the amp. Then upload your videos onto your computer and import them into Windows Movie Maker. The "movie" you made is the guitars, then in the audio part of the timeline you can add other stuff such as drums, vocals, or more guitars. When you're done, save it as a movie file so now you'll have a "video" with guitars and drums/vocals/more guitars, you'll have to repeat this step the more you want to add stuff to the guitars such as adding drums first, then saving and then adding vocals and saving again. When you're finally done, you can make your completed "video" song a .wmv file by dragging the video into the audio part of the timeline and saving. I've done this all the time and it's worked very well for me over the years up to this day.

Don't know how uncommon this is but Erik Rutan sometimes mics 2 bass cabs, one with a condenser and another with a dynamic mic. This way, the condenser picks up the high end slapping stuff but the dynamic captures the low end rumble.

If you have dry drums via basic sampler or drum software ITB you can play them back in a reasonable room of your choice and record the output via microphone. You can do this with bass+drums, or even guitar tracks.


Instant ambience the old fashioned way ! Yes , i know there are amazing drum progs out there and great reverb plugins.

But this works great on a budget, like if you used four instances of reasamplomatic for your drums.

Hint : For some amazing sound , try tiled washrooms. They work great with doomy deathly old school vox as well as stoner sludge or basic metal (vox and gtr) sounds too.