Birds and BBQs

Location
Canberra
Equipment
Zoom H4N
MKH60
Boom pole array

Another early morning. Today we are flying up to Canberra for Anna’s father’s 60 birthday, I am not expecting anything specific, but it’s a day out of Melbourne so as usual I will be taking my gear with me. I have another reason to do so and that is because Anna’s father is also a sound recorder for television and he wants to check out some of my gear, so its worth taking it along. We are heading just out of Canberra on road to Yas to a little place called Hull. Its nice and quiet and will be a great place for a family get together. We arrived early so we could help out a bit, there was almost no one there when we arrived, but there were plenty of birds around so I wander4ed quietly among the trees and got some good bird sounds.

The first thing I recorded was some young miner birds. These are really common in Melbourne, but because of the amount of background noise in Melbourne I have never had the chance to get a good clean recording. Today I had a nice noisy bird low in a tree that seemed quite happy for me to get up close and most importantly there was no background noise. I also managed to get some sounds from a Plover. I don’t think its nesting season as these birds nest on the ground and are very defensive of their nests and very noisy. These ones weren’t too worried about where I walked, so I got a little bit of material, but I would have gotten a lot more if they had been territorial. There were a couple of dogs in the ar4ea as well so I collected some samples of them while I was wandering. I used the MKH60 on the boom pole for all of this. It was all pretty straight forward directional material as close as I could manage to each animal so the shotgun mic was about the best choice. I am a little upset that since I lost my Shure Beta 58A I have lost the best mic for close recording animals. It was really nice and clean whenever I was able to get up close to a noisy animal.

Young Minerbirds

Next I went and played with the wood pile. There was a large pile of scrape wood behind the pavilion, mainly old broken cargo pallets. I still have a lot more metal sounds in my materials section of the library than any other section so it will be good to be able to add some more wood sounds. This stuff was all split and broken so it allowed me to snap and twist and spit it to get some very cool sounds that I don’t yet have. I spent about half an hour tossing, breaking, splitting and otherwise harassing pieces of wood. So I got an unexpectedly good amount of material from the day. I finished of with sampling a little bit of the jazz band that was playing and general party ambience sounds. Oh and the food was great