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I needed to record some sounds at home today as well as work on an article I am writing, so I planned to get some recording done inside and then go for a short walk and see what was going on locally. There has been a lot of construction work in our area lately and as much as I hate waking up to it, it does provide a good opportunity to capture some new material. Firstly I recorded some water drip sounds inside. This is actually more difficult than it might sound. To capture a good neutral water drip sound, you need a room with no natural reverb, so a bathroom or laundry is not very suitable. A lounge room is probably the deadest space to record in, but then dripping water in the lounge room has its own issues. I eventually set-up a large bucket with several mics around it and worked from there. I did get some suitable material but it took some experimenting.  Electric Jackhammer The walk outside proved to be far more fruitful than I imagined. There is a new apartment building being built right next door so there was plenty of construction machinery making lots of noise. I started with a young guy digging holes with a jack hammer. I was surprised at how many different sounds a jack hammer could produce. He would start by hammering through the bitumen which produced a harsh sharp impact sound, then he proceeded to dig a post hole into the dirt which was a completely different sound. Depending on the angle and speed at which he moved the tool, the sound would vary quite a bit. I was amazed however to see the guy wasn't wearing any hearing protection. Doing this job every day this guy is going to be deaf in less than a year at this rate.  Power generator Of course to power a jack hammer, you need a generator, so I recorded that as well. I captured samples from two different positions. The sound of the generator from its exhaust was quite different from lower down near its cooling fan. I have found that its worth moving around most mechanical devices as they produce different sounds depending on where you are positioned. Next I captured a waste removal truck that was parked nearby. It was just being used to pump something smelly out of the gutters, but it also produced a different sound from different positions.  Industrial waste truck It was actually really windy outside, but because all the sounds I was recording were of fairly loud construction machines the wind was not very noticeable. One exception was through the palm trees they have planted in the area. I have recorded wind sound sa few times, but this is the strongest wind through trees I have heard, so I tried to capture some of the sound with both the shotgun mic and the mics built in to the H4N. Unfortunately the stereo mics on the H4N didn't have enough protection for the strong wind and the samples were unusable. But I did get a fairly good sample from the shotgun mic.  I captured a surprising number of good sounds today without moving more than 500 meters from my front door. Good when you want to record sounds, but this area currently feels like a construction site all the time, which is not so good for living.
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Location Melbourne Equipment Zoom H4N Internal mics Just a quick one on the way to work today. Some construction on one of the roads near Southern Cross station. There is an overpass I walk over almost evry day and they had a large machine driving concrete pylons into the ground. The overpass meant I was quite close so I used the H4N with my new wind cover to record some good material. Anna bought me a purpose built wind cover for the H4N’s built in mics. Its quite good and means I don’t have an oversized cover that falls off and looks silly. This one attaches properly to the mics and come4s in different colours. I write up a review for it soon.  Sinking concrete pylons Location Miteamo, Victoria Equipment Zoom H4N D112 & Beta 58A and Zoom H4 MKH60 Boom pole and tripod I love trips to the country. It’s great to get out of Melbourne, and even better to be somewhere quiet with lots of green. About three hours north of Melbourne one of my work colleagues parents own 400 acres of farm. Anna and I got to spend a day on the farm recording all sorts of interesting things. It was the most fun I’ve had in weeks. This farm is what I see as a typical Australian working farm. Lots of sheds, lots of space and LOTS of stuff. I love rusty bits of machinery and junk, I think the rust looks interesting, and it often produces really good sounds. The main reason we went to the farm was to record the sounds of my friends off road buggy that they made, but I decided to start the day with some of the sounds around the farm. Chopping firewood, hammering railway tracks, and generally bashing and crashing metal, wood and a ton of other junk took me a couple of hours. Each time I set up the MKH60 on the tripod close to the source, as well as the D112 on a mini tripod, and the Beta 58A usually just lying somewhere close. (I need to get another mini tripod) This gave me great coverage as I also had the H4N’s inbuilt mics working. The mix of microphones achieves several things. Firstly it means I will usually get at least one good recording of any source as the mics are set to different input levels and all have different levels of sensitivity. The other aspect is that each mic has its own distinct sound characteristics. The D112 is great for low frequency sounds, while the built in mics capture nice crisp high frequency sounds. When I come to editing I will often blend the different mic recordings together to get a good final sound to add to the library. If a mic has too much noise or some other issue it can be dropped from the mix. I am still getting used to this process and on a couple of occasions I did place the d112 and the beta 58A too far away from the source. They both have fairly short range pick-up patterns so I need to place them carefully or I waste them.  Don't hit the microphones My H4N received a few more battle scares today as well. I placed it too close to the logs I was cutting and one of them fell onto it and cracked the screen protector. It still functions fully, but its starting to look a little fragile and I’ll need to be more careful with it in the future. If I lose the screen its going to be mostly useless for recording. One thing I still suffer from is that when I have a lot of things to record and I am going to be moving around a lot I sometimes get lazy with mic placement and this is bad. I find myself putting the mics just generally where they need to be instead of spending the time positioning each mic to get the best result. I often feel that if I am just recording metal going crash it doesn’t matter too much if the mics are exactly right. If I am recording animals or sounds that are less common to find I am usually really careful, so I need to extend that to all things I record. On the subject of animals, the chickens refused to do anything but quiet clucks, even when they were picked up. (damn domesticated animals :-) ). And the Cows were also stubbornly quiet. We did manage to get a nice snort or two out of a beautiful quarter horse, but I think I will need to plan another trip out here specifically with animals in mind.  Lots of noisy stuff in the shed After a fantastic lunch we headed out to do some buggy recording only to have the buggy break after 3 minutes. My initial disappointment disappeared the instant I heard they would need to disassemble the buggy and grind and weld the parts to fix it. So instead of getting some buggy sounds I got a huge number of mechanical repair sounds. Grinders, hacksaws, arc welders and saws kept me busy all afternoon and I captured some great material. I think I could keep myself busy recording sounds on a farm for a couple of weeks, there are so many potential sound sources as well as a few challenges in capturing clean recordings of them all.
We both had a good day and it confirmed that I think I would prefer to live out in the country somewhere. I like trees, and I really prefer a quiet environment. Location Port Melbourne Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array More sport sounds today. I wanted to get some good kicking sounds recorded, and I needed to go out and pick-up the new cable I had ordered, so it was an afternoon outside for me. It was really bloody hot today 38 C and being out in the sun for over 3 hours was way tiring. When I did finally find somewhere to buy a drink I drank half a litre of water in about 60 seconds because I was so incredibly dehydrated. I am also really glad I put heaps of sun block on because I would have gotten very badly burnt otherwise. All good things to consider when you plan on being outside for a long time, especially in summer in Australia. I picked up my new cable and also ordered some thread adaptors that should allow me to mount the microphone on a standard camera tripod. (more on this later in the week) I walked for about half an hour down to a really large park in Port Melbourne where they had 4 sports ovals. There was a bit of traffic noise from the surrounding roads specifically from the regular semi trailers driving by, but it was infrequent enough to allow me to get some good samples. This is one of the biggest issues about any recording session outdoors. Obviously for things like sports and especially actions like hitting or kicking balls you really need to be outdoors to record. But unless you are lucky enough to live or have access to somewhere very remote there is almost always the issue of background noise and usually its traffic. The advantage of a directional microphone is that it gives you some ability to focus it away from the worst source of background noise. I always make sure I walk into any park area as far as possible and usually try to choose an area with lots of trees. Trees do a really excellent job of absorbing or blocking noise. Then I’ll set-up my microphone so its pointing away from the worst noise and preferably towards the largest area of park. (Hopefully I’ve chosen a day with no people around as well. In this case being nearly 40 degrees certainly helped on that front. No one else was crazy enough to be outside today). I spent about an hour alternating between kicking a rugby ball and a soccer ball. Being there by myself meant I spent more time going and retrieving the balls than I did actually kicking them, but that was ok. I got some very good samples of both balls and made sure I recorded kicking in various styles. From hand, off the ground, drop kicking, bouncing etc. I then added some bounces and other incidental ball noises. On the walk back I managed to record a large industrial complex that has some noisy boiler fans running and a electrical power station that had a good hum sound going. A bloody hot day, but a fairly useful recording session.  Port Melbourne Factory Location Sovereign Hill, Ballarat, Victoria Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array and Roland R09 Handheld Time for a road trip! There have been quite a few sounds I have had on the list for a while that I have wanted to collect and a few sounds that would be useful for the Australian sound exhibit I am playing with. A trip to Ballarat and Sovereign Hill was something I’d wanted to do for a while. I knew they had horse drawn carriages and some mining machinery there as well as other sounds that would be worth grabbing. When we arrived it seemed far quieter than I remembered. (Yeah ok so it’s probably been over 10 years since I’d been there but still.), apart from LOTS of people including noisy children, initially there didn’t seem to be too much going on. I remembered they had giant noisy rock crushing machines and all sorts of stuff that didn’t seem to be operating. Anyway we started to have a look around and check out the different areas. Anna had never been to Sovereign Hill so she was enjoying doing stuff like panning for gold and generally wandering around.  Sovereign Hill Metal Turning We did find a few period machines running and had a chat to an old guy that worked there, he told us that the crushing machines would soon be starting up and that there was a display with guys firing old muskets, so the day was starting to look up and get noisier. We went for a ride on the stagecoach and I got to sit up front where I could record both the horses and the wagon moving, then we went across and got to record a whole series of period steam engines and the crushers. The different machine had an awesome selection of different operating sounds and I recorded a heap of material. The more we explored the more interesting sounds I discovered. In fact this has been one of the most useful and varied recording days I’ve had in a long time. 5 hours of walking around was well worth it for all the material it provided.  Horse Drawn Wagon One thing that was noteworthy for today is a technical issue that I had to deal with. I had a problem a few weeks back when the main cable from the mic to the F4 started to play up and cut out. I did get it repaired a couple of weeks ago (supposedly) but it started to play up again a few days ago. I rang my usual suppler before we headed out today to try and get a replacement to find they were shut for the Christmas break. I did manage to rig something up to allow me to keep working today, but it did sacrifice the normal backup track I usually have so it wasn’t an ideal situation. I also found by the end of the day that I had almost drained all the batteries I had with me. Now while I could easily have bought some more as both my units run on normal AA batteries the point was that I had plenty more at home and should have brought them along. I also should really have a backup cable at home because if a cable is EVER going to break it will be in the middle of the night when all the shops are closed just before the alien invasion fleet arrives and you miss out on recording any of it. Obviously you can’t have two of everything unless you have a huge budget to play with, but for the obvious things that are prone to wear and tear like cables it’s a pretty good idea to be packing a spare. I think in general its going to be a good habit to make sure whenever I am going out I have an empty memory card, plenty of batteries and anything else I might need should I find myself recording so many good sounds that I am kept busy all day.  Sovereign Hill Steam Engine Location North Melbourne Victoria Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array One of the things I really hate about moving is that I loose heaps of time when I am unable to record. I guess starting a new job, moving interstate (AGAIN!) and trying to find an apartment is fairly good justification, but it still really disappoints me when so much time goes by without getting to record some new material. Anyway today the break ends. We are staying with a very good friend of ours who is kindly allowing us to occupy her spare room while we look for an apartment. Today she decided to mow her back lawn. She has a really old clunky smokey Victor lawn mower, which made me soooo happy as not only do I not have a lawn mower yet, but I really want to record a Victor for my project on Australian sounds. And the fact that it was clunky and smokey just made it all the more perfect. I got a good 15 minutes of material as I followed her around in my socks (purchased two days before as all my old one had holes in them, hardly surprising when I walk around in the garden in them as someone is trying to mow the lawn) I made sure I got some close up as well as distant material. I personally think there is something so Australian about hearing a distant lawnmower on the weekend, so it’s a great new sound for the library.  Noisy but functional lawn mower Location Noosa Queensland Equipment Zoom H4 MKH60 Boom Pole Setup With only a couple of days left in Noosa I wanted to capture a few last sounds before we left, so I went out for a walk with my gear. I knew there were some tennis courts nearby so I headed in that direction as I don’t have any tennis sounds yet. It was juts the local tennis club and they were happy for me to stand around with a microphone for a while. (You would be amazed how uncomfortable some people get when there is a mic around; these guys were cool with it) I got some really good material because there were both men and women playing so I managed to get some good sounds of people exerting them selves as they went for shots or played the more powerful shots. Of course I also got the impacts of the tennis balls on the racket, court and net and the typical squeaky shoes. I must have spent close to an hour there and I got into watching a couple of the matches as the players were really pretty good.  Noosa Tennis Club On my way out from the tennis courts I noticed a guy messing around with the back of this unusual truck. The sign on the truck read “Concrete mixing” so I guess that’s what it was, but he was actually cleaning the system out after having used it. It was making some cool grinding and clunking sounds as the pump cycled without any concrete in it. He was also using a long metal pole to dislodge the built up concrete. Very interesting looking gear and made some good sounds. Once again I just happened to be in the right place at the right time for that one. Both the tennis and the concrete mixer were pretty straight forward to record as I didn’t have much background sound to worry about as they were in a quiet part of Noosa. It was really just a case of position myself where it sounded good and point the shotgun mic at the target. I wish all recording sessions were this easy.  Concrete mixer Location Noosa Queensland Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array and Roland R09 Today as planned I went out to the Noosa Museum in Pomona. The people there were really friendly and helpful. The old guy Bob went through the place with me switching on old machines and using old tools so I could record the sounds. He also gave me a heap of info about various things, how they worked and some of their history. I love this work. So I spent about 20 minutes trying out old telephones and an old telephone exchange, I recorded a Morse code transmitter and thanks to a help sheet that indicated the codes for the entire alphabet I recorded all of the alphabet and numerals, so once they get catalogued people will be able to recreate actual Morse code messages which could be fun.  Noosa Museum I couldn’t ignore that one of the most interesting sounds in the place was not any of the exhibits, but the old wind blown air vent up on the roof. It circulates air into the building just by spinning in the wind, and there is a shaft down from the top of the roof into the interior. One of those was making a great squeaking sound as it spun, so I extended the boom pole right up into the roof to sample it. Downstairs I recorded the old industrial butter churn as well as a whole bunch of old hand operated house appliances, then I recorded some old adding machines and another old typewriter. Bob also started up an old rotary plough from the 1950’s. It only took him three tries to get the thing started; I remember my mum’s old lawnmower being harder than that to start! In all I recorded about an hour of really good raw material that’s going to add some really interesting material to the library. I’m also thinking I might want to create another category for historical sounds so I can differentiate between a 50 year old car or typewriter and newer ones. www.noosamuseum.spiderweb.com.au/  Industrial Butter Churn Location Noosa Queensland Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array It appears to be the time for tradesmen and work around here. Today it was the house in which we are staying which is having a new retaining wall put in. The two gentlemen were busy sawing up very hefty beams of wood to use as the main support posts. Again being distracted from work by loud power tools I thought it a better use of the time to record said power tools than to bemoan them preventing me from hearing the nice quiet local bird sounds I was trying to catalogue. I had a brief chat to the two of them and then sampled a circular saw, plain and two electric drills. I even remembered to write down what brand they were so I could be unnecessarily specific when I catalogue them. I am sure someone somewhere will appreciate that they know what brand of power saw I recorded. Maybe I can start advertising power tools on the webpage. Location South Gippland Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array We are now on our way North to Queensland. We have hired a 4WD and will be spending about 5 days driving along the east coast of Australia. I plan to record anything of interest whenever I get the chance. I had missed the opportunity to record a wind power generator in Japan, and so I was glad to have the chance to grab some material here. We were able to get within about 50 meters of a very large wind turbine and the sound as we go tout of the car was great. These things are pretty big and the sound was well worth the detour. Typically there were cows who decided to be very noisy, but I got a fair bit of material with just the turbine going. I also recorded the power depot next to the car-park which had a good generic electrical hum going on.  Victoria Wind Turbine |
AuthorStephan Schütze has been recording sounds for over twenty years. This journal logs his thoughts and experiences Categories
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