Songfighters are a creative bunch who don't settle for presets (however useful they can be in a pinch). This page provides an overview of people's techniques to create sonic effects and links to detailed explanations where necessary. For links to samples, synths and other sound sources, there should be another page (presumably something like Sound Sources).

Alligator Clips for use on stringed instruments. Attach the little buggers to your strings at various sweet spots (experiment for resonance) and flick the end to set it in motion, bouncing or vibrating against the next string. For most responsive bounces attach the clip in the first notch, for more subtle action move it down a few notches. Add a little delay and you're golden. Roymond's Honeymoon In Polynesia and Talk About Your Feelings feature this sound.

Slide Guitar - expanded use of slide techniques. Sure, classic blues, lap or Hawaiian slide is sweet, but for harmonic filler, try tuning your guitar to an open chord, then use a screw driver (some prefer those without a pollished shaft - you know, a little rough) and either vibrate it in place perpenticular to the neck for a shimmering effect or slide up to a chord and then vibrate it to sustain. Roymond's Feathers is an example. One essential companion to your slide is a volume pedal. Using a volume pedal with a slide will allow you to create a huge range of sounds but will also just generally make your slide playing sound cleaner if you roll the volume down a bit when you're sliding to/from/between notes.

The Luke Henley method to slide guitar: Use a cell phone and put that guitar on your lap. Slide around like a bastard until you approximate the various notes you're trying to hit. Do not avoid dissonance. Tuning the guitar beforehand is optional, and by no means recommended. Instead of recording using a mic, try to record the cell phone line.

Keyboard beats: as heard on Four Tet's 'Pause' album, for making percussion patterns when you're lacking a real drum kit. Point your microphone towards the keyboard (or any solid object that you can hit with a stick/hand/toothbrush) and create a percussive sound while recording into a wave editing program. Save the individual hits as .wavs and load them into a soft-sampler (eg, Reason's Redrum) where you can start writing patterns using the samples. This is good for giving rhythm to everyday sounds.