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Location Albert Park Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom Pole array and R09 handheld AKG D112 Well today in some ways made up for Avalon not being quite what I had hoped it would be. The Melbourne F1 Grand Prix is on this weekend and today was a day for some F1 practise as well as some of the other cars doing some short race events. I hadn’t planned much on going down there, but when we woke up and could here the cars from our apartment I thought it might be worth taking a look and see what was happening today. Because I hadn’t organised prior media access I just needed to get a ticket and go in normally like everyone else, which was hardly the end of the world, it would just limit where I could go once I got in. I captured a little bit of material at the end of a GT race, I got some fairly good material of some Porches, Lotus, BMW’s and I think maybe a Ferrari. A guy showed me the program and told me there was going to be a BlackHawk Helicopter demonstration in about half an hour so I headed over to where they had one parked just in time for its pre launch prep. I managed to capture a clean full power up and take off sequence which I was really happy about, especially so since the BlackHawks at Avalon had been a total disaster with all the crap music and commentary going on. This time the helicopter was on a patch a grass miles from anyone or any noise with only a few guy standing around waiting to take photos, so it was a great opportunity. Later on I managed to capture a fair bit of good material as two BlackHawks did their manoeuvres.  UH60 Black Hawk After that I caught some more Army gear as they had brought along their hotted up Land Rover. This thing is insane; six wheels, all supper slick racing tyres and rims, and a 7 litre super charged Chev engine that sounds like thunder. I got a good deal of material from this and also talked to the guys in charge about possibly organising to visit them in the future and get some samples of it actually on the track, so keep an eye out for that one. Mixed in with all this for some reason the local maintenance guys were trimming some trees. I guess maybe it was for safety on the weekend, but either way I even got to record some chain saw sounds, the guy seemed fairly keen to help out to so I got a few extra revs as he was working which was great. Thanks Mr. chain saw guy!  The Army goes zooom! Then we got the F1s. Bloody hell but they are loud! I tried different positions and also used my D112 mic which is specifically designed to deal with high output sounds. Obviously all I could ever capture was the sound of an F1 flying past at crazy speeds, and some general race ambience. I am going to need to be a lot more influential before I’ll get an opportunity to attach a mic to one of those beasties, but I did get some good material today, far more than I was originally expecting. Every day I go out recording its almost impossible to predict the outcome. I guess I just need to get out as often as possible and hope for the best.
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Location Canberra Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom Pole array and R09 handheld Today I had to fly up to Canberra for the day. For those of you who may not know, Canberra is Australia’s capital. Yeah I know, most people thinks its Sydney, which is understandable as a lot of stuff happens in Sydney and the only thing that seems to happen in Canberra is politicians arguing. Canberra was constructed specifically to serve as our capital and as such has been designed and laid out specifically, rather than growing organically as most cities do. It’s a tidy, fairly attractive city but it has a reputation for being a bit dull. It is however home of many of our national institutions and that was why I needed to fly up for the day. I had a meeting with some people at the National Museum of Australia, which is a fairly new building on the edge of a giant lake. I arrived a bit early so I thought I would take a look around. The outside of the main museum building is clad in large sheets of metal, and because of the strength of the sun they had gotten very hot, the result was a constant clicking and popping sound as the metal sheets expanded and contracted in the heat. The overall effect of dozens of these sheets sounded something like a field of insects. I tried to record a fair amount of material, but I am not sure yet how good the samples will be as the individual sounds were fairly quiet. It was a very interesting effect.  Australia's Parliment House After the meeting I decided to walk around the lake to the Carillon (pronounced Carillion) which is a large tower with bells in it that plays melodies at certain times of the day. It also chimes much like a town clock on the hour and on the quarter hour. The Carillon in Canberra is a well known location and is often used for performances; its position on the edge of the lake makes it a good spot for tourists. I wanted to get a recording of it while I was in Canberra as it is a significant Australian sound source. When I arrived there were a bunch of guys having a bbq and listening to music right next to the carillon. I asked them if they wouldn’t mind killing the music or a couple of minutes while I did some recording. They were really good about it and even offered me a beer while we waited. I may be wrong here, but this strikes me as such an Australian thing to do. A complete stranger comes along, interrupts your party, asks a favour but you offer him a beer and say cheers to him. Its not that other cultures don’t have great hospitality, but the offer of a beer to someone on a hot day is something Australians seem proud to do, and I have to say that after walking 5 or 6 km around the lake from the museum in 30 degrees that beer tasted bloody marvellous. At 5pm the Carillon sounded its regular chimes. (Sounded like the Westminster clock chime pattern to me) and then it went into a pre programmed pattern of music for about 15 minutes. I captured a few minutes of some of the various pieces it played. It's been nearly 20 years since I was last in Canberra but I’m sure the last time I was there the Carillon sounded much more out of tune, so whether they “fixed” it or whether my ears have adjusted over time, I found the tunes interesting to listen to.  The Carillon in Canberra I didn’t do much recording today, but I did carry all my gear on the plane simply to capture the Carillon. If I am going to travel somewhere I don’t get to very often I will always take what I can with me just in case I get a chance to record something interesting. There were some nice bird sounds around the lake, but all the roads were far too close to be able to get a good recording of anything, and I just didn’t have the time to go anywhere remote and do more recording. I am more than likely to be travelling to Canberra again fairly soon as I might find myself doing some work with the National Museum, so maybe next time I can plan on recording some bird sounds.
Location
Melbourne Update Well for the first time in nearly 6 months my sorted folder is empty. Perhaps this is a good time to explain the process of how I categorise the material in the library. Firstly anything that I record on any of my equipment will get put through the process of being sorted, edited and categorised for the library. A lot of the raw material will never get into the library itself for various reasons. Firstly, if I record a series of events then there will always be a lot of useless sounds while I am waiting for events to occur, or the sound levels were too low or too high, or if I am lucky enough to be able to record a lot of the same material then I will select only the best material to be included in the library. Also, sometimes some recordings just suck. The material is bad, or there is too much back ground noise, or the levels were way out. The first step is to upload all the material to my laptop. This is either done through a direct cable link to the device or by removing an SD card and plugging it straight into my laptop. Everything that comes off my devices goes into a folder called “unsorted”. I do not delete the material from the devices until this first copy of the raw recordings has been sorted. I go through each raw Wav file and work out roughly what is on it and then label it appropriately. Mono files are given a straight descriptive name, stereo files from the R09 are prefixed with R09 so I can tell them apart. This is because often I use the R09 as a backup for recordings done with the H4 or other gear, it also lets me know quickly where my stereo recordings are. All of these files are saved into a folder called “sorted” and the raw files are placed with their original names and formatting into a labelled folder such as H4_japan_baseball_oct_08. This is my raw material and its now archived away. Once this step is done and I have both the archived version of the raw material and the sorted and renamed version I will then feel comfortable about deleting the source material off the devices. Backup is essential for any serious project. As I’ve already indicated I work under a process of backing up right from the first instance of dealing with the files. The end files for the library as well as all the raw source are located on at least two active hard drives at different locations as well as regular DVD backups burnt and stored at a third location. This may seem excessive, but anyone who has ever suffered from data loss on a project will understand my caution. I spend a lot of time organising, recording and cataloguing my sounds, and I will always take the time to make sure the data is safe. Once files are committed to the sorted folder they wait there until I go through them and sort each file carefully. This requires listening to almost the entirety of each file, selecting appropriate sound material and then copying it out to another file and trimming it as necessary. Very occasionally I might boost the sound or clean up some hiss or low frequency hum. In general I try to record things clean and get them in the library as close to original as possible. Created sounds are the obvious exception to this rule. Because of the amount of time it takes to sort and categorise sounds there tends to be a constant backlog of unfinished material in both the unsorted and sorted folders. I have made a concerted effort recently to get up to date before I make the next big push in recording new material. At this date the website does not even exist, but I believe I am well on track to have the site up and running in the first half of 2009. (if you’re reading this you will know whether I was right or not :-) ) The library is sitting just under 8000 catalogued sounds, with a target of 10000 set to be reached before the site goes live. I have 3/10 video journals completed and 6/20 tutorials ready to go up. Many of the other features are well under way and it will simply be a case of getting the work done and getting everything completed. Location
Melbourne Docklands Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Tripod Mount and R09 handheld What do you do when the army decides to spend hours flying around the city chasing each other in helicopters? Set up your equipment of course! The Australian Defence Force had announced recently that there would be various military training exercises occurring over Melbourne in the near future. The first of these took place today and consisted of what appeared to be two Squirrel Class helicopters being pursued by up to four Blackhawk helicopters over the Melbourne city area. A lot of the time the helicopters where flying without running lights on in what I assume was a tactic to approach each other unnoticed. I am also assuming that the air traffic over Melbourne was completely cleared for this exercise as it would have been bloody dangerous otherwise. Because of the completely unpredictable nature of their movements I thought it would be pointless to try and find a “perfect” position to record them and just set up my gear on our balcony. It was more an opportunistic session than a planned one, but I did get a few good passes, most notably when the Blackhawk’s went past in close formation. Having a large memory card in my recorders means I can just switch them on and leave them for several hours just in case something good happens. This was the best approach as the helicopters would often fly off for quite sometime before returning. Location Avalon Airport Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array and R09 handheld Well today was something I had been planning for and looking forward to for sometime. The reality on the day was a series of annoyances and frustration. Perhaps the best thing I learnt was that some days are just going to suck. With any large event such as an air show I make sure I do plenty of preparation, checking all my gear recharging batteries, packing spares, clearing memory cards. This is stuff I do regularly anyway, but when it’s an unusual event I make sure I go through it all carefully. I even packed two cameras to help with the new video journals I am trying to add. Its just part of trying to be professional, check your gear, make sure you don’t forget anything and avoid dumb mistakes. Its never perfect but it helps. Anyway I had everything sorted and ready, and I drove out to Avalon with my special parking pass and media access stuff, I even had time to go around and take still shots of all the major planes I was planning to record during the day. Then the flying demonstrations started and everything fell to pieces. Last time I had been to Avalon there was a fair bit of canned music through PA speakers, it was fairly annoying and got in the way of some of the recordings. I managed to position myself to be away from most of it. This year the geniuses involved obviously thought that no human being can possibly cope with watching an event as boring as supersonic jet fighters pulling death defying stunts without really loud, crap rock music and annoying commentary every single second. I had even gone to the trouble of contacting the organisers before hand and pointing out that media sound crews could not do their jobs properly with music playing and that it would be really nice if they could go without it on the media days and save it for the public access days. They obviously interpreted this as “turn it up please” The music and verbal dribbling was present almost everywhere, and I was very close to saying screw you and leaving. I did not however as I was determined to grab something from the day.  USAF B1 Bomber From a learning point of view today was pretty useful I think, although at the time it was hard to think so. Earlier in the day before the flying show started I walked around to grab still shots of various planes. Because the airport was still being used for some commercial flights there were passenger planes landing every half hour or so. I found myself torn between rushing off and recording these and taking photos, and then a helicopter came in and my immediate thought was to rush off and record it. Seeing as the airport was laid out over about a kilometre strip with planes parked all along, this could very easily have lead to me spending the entire day running back and forth, missing everything and achieving nothing but exhausting myself. That would have been a total waste of a day. I knew that the fighter staging ground was up one end of the runway and that most planes would taxi out to the runway and start their take-off from there. This spot also happened to be fairly free of PA speakers, so I decided to stake out a spot and camp there for the day. I did manage to get a good sample of a 747 Jumbo idling, and taxiing out to the runway and finally taking off, as well as a couple of other clean samples of planes. The problem with my position was that every time a plane was up, there would be another waiting to come onto the runway, and an idling plane tend to be fairly loud, especially fighter jets. So a lot of my material was contaminated by other sounds. It seemed no matter where I positioned myself for the day I was not going to get nice clean material.  As far as recording was concerned I needed to be very aware of the extremes of sounds I was exposed to. The planes when idling are fairly constant and quite audible without being too loud, but when a fighter takes off or does an extreme manoeuvre while flying the volume level is very extreme. Not only do you need to be very careful with your hearing, but it creates a big challenge for recording. At all times I had the R09 recording on its absolute lowest input level, and a lot of the material captured there is very good. The Sennheiser in some ways is far too directional and sensitive to be pointing at the business end of a jet engine during take-off, and while I got lots of material I also got a lot of distortion even with very low input levels. This was mitigated somewhat by having different levels set on the left and right channels. But sometimes the shear power of the sound waves coming from something like a jet engine is just too much. The problem with moving further away is that then you risk picking up other sounds in between. And frankly one of the fighters was still extremely loud even when it shot above the clouds, so it’s a tricky balance to work with.  USMC F16 Fighting Falcon Some useful things to remember at an event with lots of noisy vehicles.
-Remember planes travel so fast you don’t want to track the plane with a directional mic, you want to be aiming just behind it, because that’s where the sound is coming from. -I would always recommend having at least two devices for a day like this. Set one on very low input levels and use it as a backup for extreme sound levels. -Make a rough plan, but be prepared to be flexible, don’t however try and be everywhere at once, that will just get you tired and frustrated. -Don’t plan to sample everything, concentrate on getting what you can, and try not to be disappointed on what you might have missed out on. -WEAR SUNSCREEN! Yeah I got badly burnt because it was very cloudy in the morning, but it cleared, and airports have very little shade for obvious reasons. I had sunscreen in the car, but it was a fair hike back to the car park. My bad, and I’m suffering for it. I should probably buy a hat, but I look like a total noob in a hat. -It is worth checking your gear and having a routine for each time you go out. Of all the issues I had at Avalon, non of them were gear related, everything did what it was supposed to, and did it pretty well. Location Melbourne CBD Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 tripod mount and R09 handheld This week has been the time of the Moomba Festival in Melbourne. For those of you not from Australia, Moomba is a festival in Melbourne with several parades and performances in various locations as well as a carnival on the Yarra river on the edge of the city. I wanted to record the main parade to add to the library as well as for another project I am working on, so I got up, got my gears ready and headed into the city. The Moomba parade is much like many other parades with musicians and dancers and lots of costumes. Because of Australia’s diverse mix of cultures Moomba has a wide range of looks and sounds to the parade.  Moomba Costumes The biggest issue for recording was the shear range of volumes as things passed by me. Some of the groups had quiet subtle sounds like people tap dancing, or a Buddhist group that had quiet bells and chanting. The other extremes were the amplified bands, and anything with lots of drums and cymbals. (Which are pretty common in most parades.) I was carrying both the R09 in my hand as well as the H4 on the boom pole (as well as my camera to document things. I really need to grow a third arm) I tried to keep an eye on both the monitoring levels of both devices, but even with that some of the sounds still maxed out simply because I had the device set to the absolute lowest input and things were still too loud. Bass drums and cymbals really tend to push the limit sometimes. Usually when I have both devices I tend to set the R09 to a very low level, but I may need to take it to the next level and start using mics designed specifically to cope with high SPL. Time to do some tests I think.  The Chinese Dragon always finishes the parade The other aspect of today’s recording was the need to be super mobile. I was on the parade area and needed to move quickly and easily around the various groups to get interesting sounds, or to find the best angle to record a group. Initially I had the boom pole extended quite far as I thought it might be useful to lean over the top of groups or position in unusually places, but considering I was using the R09 as well in one hand, the boom tended to be angled down towards the ground, with the microphone itself angled pointing upwards. This is a fairly good position to use the boom in, however it did mean I had an extra length of pole sticking out behind me. Thankfully I realised this before I clubbed someone from either the crowd or the parade with the end of the pole, and quickly retracted the excess length. I’ve often found that even prior planning for some events doesn’t help much when the real action starts and you find yourself having to respond to other people’s actions, so you really need to stay flexible. Considering there have been several instances lately where I have used both the R09 and the H4 to capture pretty much identical material I think I may need to look at mounting the R09 on the boom pole with the H4, thus removing the need for me to dedicate another hand to it.
Location Melbourne Docklands Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 tripod mount and R09 handheld I planned to capture some more of the domestic sounds I want to add to the library today. I set-up the gear on the tripod so I could use both hands to deal with things like a toaster and a kettle and can openers. I got a fairly good selection of samples in the apartment, and tried a few odd things like putting the R09 in the freezer to see what it could record. So far I am not satisfied with the results of that, but I think it has potential so I’ll try again at another time. While I was recording various things inside I kept hearing drums from outside so I thought I would go and investigate. I was lucky to discover just over the other side of the docklands area there was a dragon boat racing event. So I grabbed my gear and went for a walk. The racing was from all around Victoria with a large number of teams competing. I set myself up on a pontoon pier half way along the race course and managed to get a fairly good selection of material of both the actual races as well as the boats paddling by slowly on their way from the martialling area to the race start point. The pier itself had a large post in the centre at the end and each time the boats went past I found myself tracking the boats and pointing straight at the post (with the resultant occlusion sound issues) The problem was there just wasn’t a better position to be in. If I had stood on the dock bank where there was no pole I would have been 100 meters further away from the boats themselves. It shows that sometimes there is no perfect position and you just need to make the best of what you have. (Sitting on top of the post would have been precarious and uncomfortable.) Obviously the best location would have been inside one of the boats, but as that wasn’t going to happen any time soon, I recorded about 5 races which I can cut up later to get some good sound examples.  Dragon Boat racing One notable thing as far as recording for the day was the nearby pub that had some music playing. They had speakers both indoors and outdoor and the music was carrying to where I was setup. I decided to go and ask them if they could switch off the outdoor speakers for a little while I recorded the races and they were really good about it. I made sure I went back afterwards and let them know when I was finished so they could turn them back on. Sometimes just politely asking for someone to help out can have really good results. Its not always the case, but I’ve found its certainly worth the effort of finding out, so don’t be afraid under these circumstances to approach someone and explain to them what your doing. A lot of people find filming and recording interesting so they are often happy to help if they can and if its not a huge trouble for them. I like to be helpful in return and let them know when I’ve finished so they can get on with what they were doing.
Location
Melbourne Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array I decided to try and capture some roller blading sounds today, so I stuck on my skates. Grabbed my gear and went out to record while I skated. I then turned around and came back inside because the normally quiet Docklands area had more people than I have seen in ages. (ok a Sunday afternoon was probably a bad time :-) ) Later in the Evening Anna and I went out for a walk and I decided t try again. Anna walked along as I skated up and down and around in circles while I was recording. I kind of looked like I was playing hockey the way I was carrying the boom pole. I needed to keep the mic as close to the blades as possible, and turned away from the direction I was skating in to avoid wind noise. (Although listening back the blimp cover I am using is doing a great job of preventing wind noise) I tried skating on various surfaces including wooden decking along the Docklands promenade board-walk. Interesting sounds, and also an interesting challenge to skate on. Today was the first attempt at video documenting a recording session. Anna did some shooting with our little camera set on video mode. It struggles a bit at night in the low light and the quality is a little grainy, so in future I should try and keep it to day time recording sessions, but I think its going to be a good way to add another dimension ot the recording journal. I will be editing the material together into something useful and adding a commentary so they can act as stand alone journal entries or to accompany the written journal. Once I sort out the formatting every time there is a video entry I will include a link to youtube or something similar to host the video journals. |
AuthorStephan Schütze has been recording sounds for over twenty years. This journal logs his thoughts and experiences Categories
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