For my b-day my wife and kiddos gave me the complete set of resin SOL German Marching Band, plus some civilians (to watch the band play!) and also the "color Guard" kit that is an additional option. I've had my eye on this huge set (30+ figures!) for quite some time, but could never justify the costs (well over $200 for everything!).

So now I plan an urban scene where the band is marching down the street, while civilians stand on the sidewalk and observe. I have downloaded some really nice MP3 and WAV format German Military Marching music, and my plan is to use the base to house a sound player of some sort (cassette player? Walkman?) that will play the crowd noise and the band music when the appropriate button is pushed. The song I like best is 3:45 minutes long, but I may simply do a CD with about a dozen similar songs I found.

Any ideas or experience you could share on rigging the player? Any comments about similar "multi-media" dioramas you may have seen would be appreciated!

hi there
just something minor, dunno if itll help, BUT, my eldest wanted to help me build my 8ft long gaming table, which has a ruined/destroyed city across it, for use in the warhammer type games. He suggested including things like house and street lights, so in order to do that, i was considering mounting the thing on a frame, to give room underneath - you could try doing that with your dio? could you use a small handheld dictafone that is fixed in place and position it so that when a button is pressed at the front of the frame/box it depresses the button on the dictafone - hope you get what i mean - something along those lines anyway!

sound like a great dio idea hope it goes well!

alpha

Life is too strange sometimes. I'm home with a sick child and was watching the history channel and the story was about all the holywood people who joined the military - Clark Gable, and Glen Miller (the musician).
Long story short - Glen Miller was made a captain and put in charge of creating a big band. They had a shot of the band on the marching ground with two jeeps in the middle of the formation. On the back they customized a platform to hold a set of drums. A bass player was standing in the passangers seat of one of them.

I thought it was a cool diorama idea and thought of exactally what you are talking about with music. I encourage your to keep going.
Sorry - no direct experience with MP3's

Keith

I also posted this in the Digital Dioramas forum but I will do it here again.
What you can do is making a hollow base (duh really Robert) Yep a hollow base with underneath it some sort of frame to hang the music device in and with some holes in the front of your base to let the buttons of the walkman/diskman/whatever can still be pushable. But the you still have the problem that you have to lift the whole dio to change the batteries.

Another idea is making a hollow base with a drawer in it. You simply lay your playing device in it and Voila...... easy casette/cd/battery changing you could even put in a couple of your favourite marching cd`s/cassettes in it.

For the speakers you could ask in a modeltrainshop I believe they have really small speakers that could easily be set to a walkman or something and they are sosmall that they can be hidden almost everywhere in the dio. Another thing you could do is you have this small speakersets for walkmans. If you remove the casing of the speaker and then you only have the speaker wich you can hide in a building or something similar.

If you still need songs I have this URL for you Songsection of the third reich fact book the numbers with the musicnote are downloadable rightclick on it and "save target as"

Further I want to say that a friend of me did a similar dio but then Vietnam style with a group of soldiers sitting in ront of a barrack on the barrack was a speaker from a trainshop mounted. But in the barrack was a bigger walkman speaker hidden. the music was simply played from a walkman hidden in the base and with the drawer system.
The result 8 guys who were playing cards reading magazines in front of the barrack lisstening to Hendrix, the Stones and more of those good artists.

Hope it was of any help

The raised base is the simplest way to go. Also, if you have a facade of buildings, you would be able to mount the electronics behind them and as long as this isn't ona turntable, you're good to go. Using headphone speakers would be doable, but would sound tinny. You might want to find some non-amplified speakers and disassemble the case and mount them maybe below a manhole cover and/or a storm grate. As I'm thinking, you could wire a second sound souce with crowd sounds, cheers, clapping, etc, to headphone speakers hidden behind the crowd in the facade. How cool would that be!

You could get 2 walkman's. Make 1 playing crowd noise and the other the music. Put 1 speaker from each walkman on each side. That might blend the sounds together. And how could you forget Ted Williams in your list of celebs. In WWII and Korea. Truely a awesome man. Don't no about his children yet, though.

#9 The Splendid Splinter! If my father had had his way, this post would have been placed here by twlafleche, intead of ajlafleche.

Faust - neat link to the SongSection... but this is a marching band, so I needed to find instumental music only (although it was really fun to listen to many of the songs on that site!).

At any rate, i have found a site that has old Werhmacht marching music (most of it very old recordings!) and have downloaded a few of the pieces. I have decided to go with your "drawer and Cassett player" technique... it is the most practical. I will extend speaker behind the buildings and under the street sewer cover to provide amplification... I figure if nothing else, I can record about a dozen marches on a single tape that will play for 30-45 minutes...

Thanks gang for all the input!