Over the years I’ve been obsessed with the plucked sound of Delia Derbyshire’s original version of the Doctor Who theme. What is it?! I had read everything from a plucked piano string, to regular string, to God knows what. Last night on a whim I decided to do another search and came across something new: Mark Ayres mentions a rubber band. A rubber band! So “what the heck,” I thought, “I have a rubber band and a microphone” and set off to record some pluckin’

To my surprise it sounded pretty good. I still don’t know for sure what Delia used. Is it a rubber band? It could be a combination of a rubber band and some other plucked sounds as well, but I’d say after this experiment, the Myth is definitely Plausible.

I thought I would share this with other Whomixers, maybe someone else more clever than myself can experiment further and finally give us a sample that’s more identical. All I used was a regular rubber band, stretched over a cardboard shoe box (Converse! :D) …I put a shirt inside the shoe box, too, to soften the force of the sound. That’s basically all the technical information there is as to how I did this :D