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Location
Melbourne Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array and R09 handheld We went to visit some friends today to pick-up a few things so I took the opportunity to record their two year old son. Josh is a nice lively and very cute 2yo, who almost becomes mute in the presence of strangers, just my luck. We did eventually get some squeaks and giggles out of him with a little coaxing from his mum. I would like to get a large selection of human sounds, but it is obviously difficult with children as I don’t want to be traumatising them in the process, and expecting them to perform on cue is a bit mean. So I will continue to patiently wait with my gear ready on the off chance they decide to have a laughing fit or a hissy fit.
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Location Melbourne Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array and R09 handheld I really hate it when I am so busy I go for ages without recording new raw material. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I have nearly finished the major piece of music I have been writing lately as well as other things on my plate, but I plan to get into a new batch of recordings and there will be some changes coming up to the recording journal format as well. All for the better I hope. Anyway I have been meaning to record an air horn for the last few weeks for a couple of projects I am working on as well as for the library. I finally got around to buying one and found out one of the of the guys at work also had a little one, so I got to record two different versions which was good. I will be recording this thing outdoors sometime soon, but initially I wanted to get a sample indoors where there were no extraneous noises. I positioned the air horn at one end of an office area an positioned myself about 10 meters away. I knew the horns would be loud and I didn’t want to be too close. I also positioned the R09 on the floor a fair distance from the horns as well. The horns were even louder than I remembered, so I was very glad to be that far back. I needed to lower the levels on the H4 twice before it could capture without peaking. I recorded a selection of long and short bursts on both horns. I actually found that the R09 did a really good job of capturing the sounds. I had it set to the absolute lowest input level possible and the horn sounds came right up to max but didn’t peak. The beauty of this was that because of the low input level there is absolutely no other sounds being picked up by the R09’s mics so it’s a really nice clean recording.  I haven’t checked the H4’s recordings yet, but it doesn’t matter either way as the R09 seemed to have won the day this time. Its really important with sounds, and especially loud sounds to not position the mics too close to the source as sometimes even sounds you wouldn’t expect to distort can end up as bad recordings.
Location
Melbourne Docklands Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Tripod mount and R09 handheld Anna and I went out so I could get some more of the impact sounds I started on Wednesday. There is a nearby construction area where they have wire fences and giant plastic barricades. Anna came for the walk, but she insisted on carrying the metal rubbish bin. (often on her head :-) ) I got some really good sounds of bashing the bin against the barricades and then dragging it along them to simulate movement scrapes. I did the same against the wire fences. I’m sure passers-by wondered what this insane man was doing attacking a wire fence with a rubbish bin, but its not the first time I have had some strange looks as I’ve done recording and its certainly not going to be the last time. It was nice having Anna there for company and she also helped out by holding the R09, which meant I could work hands free. I think I might still do one more session on this stuff, but I wanted to get back and have a listen to the material I have so far to see exactly what I still need to get. I think I got some good material tonight so I have progressed well on this group of material. Location Melbourne Docklands Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Tripod mount and R09 handheld Today will go down in history as the hottest day on record in Melbourne with a top temperature of 46 degree Celsius in the city centre. It will also go down as one of the most devastating days in Victoria’s history as bushfires all over Victoria raged out of control in the incredibly hot dry and windy conditions. At the time of writing this over 100 people had lost their lives and over 70 properties had been destroyed. Anyone witnessing these events either directly or through news reports will understand how unbelievably tragic the events of today were. Not relevant to sound recording but something I felt the need to mention if for no other reason than in honour of those who lost their lives. One aspect of today’s weather was the incredible wind. Not only was it 46 degrees today but the wind for most of the day was blowing at gale force. This made walking outside feel like you were in a blast furnace. I had noticed in the past that days with strong wind caused the apartment building we live in to resonate dependant on wind direction and strength. Today was just such a day and so I went down to the car park level to try and capture some of the sound.  King Lake after the bushfire The car parking in our building takes up the first three levels, and is generally open to the air on all sides. Metal sheets with thousands of holes in them work like screens between the inside and outside areas. On some days the wind causes the screens to resonate as it passes through all the small holes. Today the force of the wind was so strong that the entire building was resonating like a giant pipe organ. The actual sounds were pure tones being produced by each screen area, but because there were a lot of screens the overall effect was creating harmonic chords. The chords where often very dissonant as the different tones clashed, but very occasionally there would be interesting combinations that made great chord sounds. I was originally only going to record about 5 minutes of this effect, but when I got down there it was so interesting that I recorded over 30 minutes of material. At times the volume was very loud as the wind got so strong. It was like witnessing some strange contemporary piece of music.
Location Melbourne Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Tripod mount I might need some suction pops for a new project in the next few weeks so I thought I’d grab some of the suction darts from the dart guns I recorded a few weeks back and record the sound of them being stuck on a surface and then pulled off. Glass seemed to be the best surface of choice as the darts stuck very easily. I recorded a bunch of sounds trying different angles and effects to see how many different sounds I could get. I think I will need to get something with a larger suction cup as well to compare the different sounds. While I was at it I got some wide clear tape and recorded sticking it to the glass and pulling it off. This was very effective as I got the pure sound of the tape and not the ripping of any surface it was stuck to. I also scrunched up the tape as I used it up. I’m not sure how useful this sound will be, but I never know how someone is going to use sounds so I guess they can all be useful.  Funky dart gun While I was at it I thought I may as well record the sounds of the dart gun firing. One of the advantage of working in a office full of geeks is that there are plenty of toys around, so I had quite a large collection of dart guns to choose from, so of course I recorded them all. They all have slightly different sounds from the different firing mechanisms they use. I am not sure why anyone would ever need a large collection of different dart gun sounds, but you never know what people will need.
Location Melbourne Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Tripod mount Time for more crashes and bangs. This time for a project with car impact sounds in it. A few years ago I recorded a bunch of sounds of one of my work colleagues slamming a metal rubbish bin (trash can for you Americans :-) ) into a concrete wall. The sounds were pretty good, but I have not been able to find the raw material and so there is none of this material in my library. In this case I needed a larger range of different surfaces to impact upon so I wanted to do it all over again. Once I purchased a metal rubbish bin from a hardware store I went down to the Docklands area where there are large concrete barricades. These are great to use as they are practically indestructible. I spent a little while bashing and scraping the bin, but the bridge overhead was producing too much road noise so I moved down the road a little and worked on some wire fence impact sounds. I got some usable material today but I am going to need to do a second session on this material as there are still other surfaces I need to capture. I learnt the lesson of not going out without my gear bag today, as my batteries ran down and I wasn’t carrying any spares. Bad Stephan, no twinkie!  Library update
I have decided, after some considering the issue, that I am going to change one of the core aspects of the library content. I had initially planned on only including mono sounds in the library, as from a sound designer point of view I would most often use mono sounds and create a stereo or surround environment when I created the final project. This is also fairly common in a lot of industries that deal with sound. I recently finished a tutorial on how to create basic and complex stereo environments out of mono sounds, and I realised that often the basic stereo effect was just not as good as a true stereo recording and that creating a complex stereo effect could be very time consuming. This was further highlighted when I stumbled across an old recording I made in Japan when I first got the R09. I was in the forest in summer recording insects on the R09 when it started to rain. I continued to record for sometime and got quite a good sample of a summer rain shower. Listening back to the recording I realised that true stereo has such a complex mix of panning depths that it is far more satisfying to listen to than basic stereo mixes created artificially. After thinking about this for some time I have decided to go through all my source material and pull out the best examples of stereo mixes and add them to the library. This should add another dimension to the environments category as well as adding more useful material for people to use. I will keep the mono versions of the relevant sounds in the library as well as they may also be useful (although most people could just convert from stereo to mono I guess) The stereo files will of course be larger in size and as such be a bigger hit on downloading, but I do think in most cases they will be well worth the time spent. I am trying to implement a process of recording both mono and stereo samples whenever I am out recording but this is not always possible. Location Melbourne City Equipment Roland R09 Handheld I was very happy again today that I have made a habit of carrying at least the R09 with me at all times. We were in the city today to do a bit of shopping and discovered it was a day of celebrations for Chinese Luna New Year. (I forgot the celebrations went for a full week) There was a parade as well as small groups roaming the city giving traditional new year’s blessings to businesses. These blessing are focused around noisy drum and gong rhythms as well as a dancing dragon and fireworks. I think the idea is that it scares away troublesome spirits and helps to ensure prosperity for the new year. From my point of view it’s a ton of great sounds to record. We caught at least two separate blessings at different ends of town as well as following a parade along the main street for some way just because we were coincidentally going the same way. The good things about parades and events like this is that they are often quite loud and so its easy to get a good strong sample, also general people noises are as much a part of the event as everything else so having people walk past doesn’t tend to spoil the recording. The R09 is perfect for this kind of situation, it kept a constant strong signal but didn’t pick up my movement from walking (although I have gotten very used to walking smoothly from time spent recording). The stereo samples are also really good for the depth of sound of these events.
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AuthorStephan Schütze has been recording sounds for over twenty years. This journal logs his thoughts and experiences Categories
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April 2019
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