Location
Melbourne CBD Equipment Zoom H4N Shure Beta 58A I rerecorded the coin sounds today. This time I positioned the microphones further away from the sound source. The results were better. The input signal was obviously less and this would account for not getting the “distortion” I was having. I have spoken to several industry people I know and there have been mixed opinions as to the cause of the original distortion effect. Some people thought it might be issues with the pre map in the recording device. (I am still not using a separate mic pre amp as I have not had a chance to get one) Someone thought it might be an issue with the analogue to digital signal converter being overloaded and causing artefacts. There is apparently a issue with recording brass ringing with certain types of microphones. I have some more information to look into regarding this. It might end up being worth creating a tutorial about when I find enough information.
0 Comments
Location Melbourne CBD Equipment Zoom H4N Shure Beta 58A I decided this week to add another aspect to the ambiance section of the library. I realised Melbourne has a huge selection of buskers who regularly play around the Melbourne city area. This is a great source of interesting and unusual music examples, and work nicely with the general ambiance of the city mixed in. It’s a far more real sound that the perfectly clean mixed music from a studio. Its not designed to be a piece of music, but more an ambiance of city life. Of course when I went out on Thursday lunchtime for the first time to look for buskers it was pouring with rain and there wasn’t a busker to be found, fairly typical of Melbourne, and one of the reasons I am really growing to dislike the place. (I hate this weather) By Friday the weather had improved and I managed to find three buskers in my lunchtime. I recorded a Scottish guy in a kilt playing a semi acoustic Guitar and singing, a guy in a cowboy hat playing blues music on a harmonica, and a guy dressed up like a dishevelled clown playing sea shanties on a very old and slightly broken accordion. I think I might end up creating a completely separate section for busker music in the library. There seems to be a very broad range of amazingly weird music out there, so I think it’s worth sampling some of it. Location Melbourne Docklands Equipment Zoom H4N MKH 60 Well I was originally going to try and record some swimming and squash sounds at the Melbourne Baths tonight, however when I went there they wanted me to officially request permission to stand in the public viewing area and point a mic at people hitting a squash ball. I do understand that what I am doing is slightly unusual, but it never ceases to amaze me how much ridiculous bureaucracy people want to go through. I always try to do the right thing by asking before I go and record stuff, but some people just seem so tied up in time wasting paperwork it makes it not worth the effort. I think I’ll go and find some small local squash centre, generally the smaller the business, the less time wasting occurs. I decided on the way home to detour via the Ice Skating rink that is near our apartment at the Docklands. There is a brand new Olympic Ice arena being constructed, but in the mean time they have set-up a tent with a temporary ice rink to get people interested. Again I approached the person at the front desk to ask who I needed to get permission from, thinking I would need to organise an email asking permission etc.. Within less than 5 minutes I was talking to the duty manager, who basically said “ Sure, no prob, there is no one here tonight, lets do it now” Like I said, small business, real people, much less pain. There were two people practising skating, so after the manger switched off the music for a few minutes I got to record some of their movement. I didn’t have my boom pole with me, so I needed to use the MKH60 in the blimp cover and hold the pistol grip, as well as holding the H4N. This in itself is not a big deal, but it became evident very quickly how much more convenient the boom pole set-up is when I decided it would be better to give my gear to one of the skaters. The different between one single pole that can be carried in either one or two hands compared with a mic and a lead attached to the recording unit is quite substantial when you need to be active. Belle did a bunch of skating moves for me including spins, slides and runs and it was so much better than if I had tried to do the skating myself. She was much more confident on the skates and could perform moves I could never have done. This meant I got a good range of material. The MKH worked very well and the resultant recordings have a beautiful cleanness to them that captured the nice high frequencies of the ice. I was very happy with the results and it made up for the frustration at the Melbourne Baths.
Location Melbourne Docklands Equipment Zoom H4N H2A Hydrophone For weeks now I have watched party and restaurant boats leaving the Docklands on Friday and Saturday nights. Last night while eating dinner I noticed one loading up with passengers and I noted the time so I could plan a recording session. Tonight I came out at 7pm in time to catch on of the boats loading up and preparing to go. This allowed me to capture a good amount of material over the 20 minutes it took to get ready. Using the hydrophone I got tons of material of its engine running underwater, as well as some material with the H4Ns built in mics to capture the surface sounds. When the boat finally manoeuvred out of the docks I got a good sample of its engines as it reversed and moved out. Just as the main boat was pulling away a second boat headed in. This gave me a great opportunity to capture two boats and to be able to compare the differences in sounds. I could really understand how navel personnel could tell what type of boat they were near by the sound of the screws (propellers) the incoming boat was much older and I could hear that its motors were not running as smoothing as the first boat. I now want to sample some more boats so I can get a selection of different boat sounds. I also captured the bilge pumps pumping out water onto the wharf. I think I might contact some of the boat operators to see if I can get access to one of the boats during one of its outings, I would like to record the sounds inside the boat as it runs, and especially the engine room if possible. I also plan to get down to station pier and record the spirit of Tasmania as it heads out. This is a much larger ship size vessel that transports people and vehicles between Melbourne and the Northern tip of Tasmania. I’d love t o record some naval vessels, but I am not sure they would be too happy about having the sounds of their ships being recorded. Something for the future maybe.
Location Melbourne Equipment Zoom H4N Beta 58A and MkH60 What was supposed to be a simple short session at work to record some material for one of our current projects has turned out to be far more interesting. Today at lunchtime I purchased a small bag of old Australian pennies. These have dates on them ranging from 1900, up to when we converted to metric money in the 1960’s. The bag of about 30 coins cost me about $7 so I guess they have increased in value pretty well. I have recorded some regular coins in the past, but I really wanted something with a different sound. I was looking for something suitable to represent pirate treasure and giant gold coins. The pennies are made of a different metal to modern coins and are much larger; this allows them to produce a stronger ringing tone. I set up the H4N using both its internal microphones as well as the Beta 58A. I wanted the mics to be nice and close to the coins as I dropped them and bounced them on various surfaces. I made sure I monitored the levels carefully to make sure there was no chance of peaking the signal. I spent about 30 minutes playing with the coins on different surfaces, from modern laminate table top, to concrete and an old wooden table. In general I was quite happy with the types of sounds I could produce by dropping, bouncing, sliding and otherwise manipulating the coins singly and in a pile to produce various sounds. When transferred the sounds to my laptop I discovered that pretty much all the material was completely unusable. Even though I had been very careful to make sure non of the sounds had peaked, the extremely close proximity to the microphones had been an issue. The coins produced a very high frequency ping each time they impacted on any surface, and it seemed that this extremely high frequency sounds were a big issue for the mics to deal with at such a close range. All the material was effectively distorted even though the readout levels never came close to peaking. I have had a similar thing happen in the past when I tried to record some gongs and bells with my shotgun mic, and I placed the mic to close to the source. This is a behaviour I will need to look into and investigate its cause, and how best to deal with it. The obvious thing is to place the microphone further away from the source, but I still want to understand exactly what is going on so I can deal with it effectively rather than just guessing. Keep an eye out for a later post on this issue as I try to find out what’s going on and redo the material I need.
Location Melbourne Studio Equipment my trusty laptop Dell Inspiron 9400 With a lot of my time taken up lately I am not getting out into the field as often as I would like to record fresh material. Also a lot of the new material I am wanting to record currently requires more planning as I usually need to organise a special location or event and go through the process of planning and arranging with organisers to get access to events and locations. To ensure that I am still generating new and interesting material for the library I am going to spend more time on creating new sound elements that everyone can use t create their own effects. There are various processes I can use to create sound effects and sound elements so I want to start to utilise more studio time to create mew sounds. I am going to be using a process called convolution, which is essentially modifying one sound by the characteristics of another sound. So for instance if I take the base sound of a gun firing which contains a very loud and short impulse with a fade tail, when I use the convolution process it will apply these characteristics to the new sound. So a long looping sound with take on the characteristics of the short sharp loud attack but retain it’s actual sound ,material. This is an excellent way to create unusual sound effects. As with many of the other sounds in the library these will be ideal building blocks for people to use to create new sounds. I will also use some of these to create some more complex sounds to add to the library at a later date. Location Docklands Equipment H4N Built in mics I was woken up this morning at about 3am by one of the biggest wind storms I’ve ever experienced in Melbourne. The wind was so strong outside our apartment that it felt like a mini hurricane. I set-up the H4N next to the window as even with the windows closed the sound was very clear. I switched it on and then went back to sleep. The result was 3 hours worth of extreme wind sounds that I’ll be editing to add to the library. I have not been doing much recording lately as I have been really busy with our first iphone game which should be out in the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple of projects at my full time job which are nearing the end of production. On top of that cutting up and cataloguing all the sounds from the farm has been quite a lot of work because there is so much good material there. I have however finally reached my main goal. As of this weekend the library now has 10,000 sounds catalogued and ready to go! The actual library functionality is still a couple of months away, and is happening more slowly than I had wanted because finding a coder has been terribly difficult, but I am really happy to have such a huge milestone achieved.
I have a few really interesting recording sessions lined up over the next couple of months, so things should start to pick up. It will also help when the weather improves because it has been bloody awful in Melbourne recently, so I will enjoy when we start to get some clearer weather that I can work in. Location Melbourne Equipment Zoom H4N AKG D112 mini tripod Today we meet Oscar. Oscar is my new stunt bin. I always try to keep a stunt bin handy as its often very useful to have something metallic and disposable that I can throw, crush and generally abuse, Oscar fits the bill perfectly. I will often use the various impact sounds from bins to mix in with other sounds, in this particular instance I needed Oscar to sound like an actual bin for a film clip I was working on. I spent about half an hour throwing and kicking the bin around on the roof of our studio to get a variety of sounds from it. I actually found the after the bin has been beaten up a little it actually sounds better I think. The main issue with this type of recording is that you need to get the impacts to occur as close to the microphones as possible but obviously hitting them with a flying bin is a really bad idea, so it pays to aim carefully. I also needed to record some witches hat sounds, quite conveniently the door to the roof area had a couple used to mark areas when repairmen were working so I borrowed one for a while and proceeded to record it as it bounced, fell and general got tossed around. Generally this was easier than the bin as the main sound was from kicking the cone in front of the mic so there was less chance of accidentally hitting the mic. Both of these were fairly minor sounds that will certainly not amaze anyone, but they were also both quit distinctive sounds that are easily recognisable. Sometimes the best way to get a sound is simply go through the time of getting the object and moving it around. Location
Melbourne Equipment Zoom H4N Shure Beta 58A Another quick session today. I needed some soft drink can noises for a small project so I grabbed a can of drink and recorded opening the can, and then bending, crushing and dropping the can. I used both the on-board mics on the H4N as well as the Shure Beta 58A. When mixed together this often produces some good results. I’m still working on new set-up to use the mics more efficiently. I’ll add some pictures of the set-up when I finish it. Location
Melbourne Equipment Zoom H4N Shure Beta 58A Once more its time to yell my head off. We needed some vocalisations for a video we were doing at work of people fighting and yelling. The roof of our building is a convenient spot for some privacy to do recording, except for all the noisy air-conditioning units. The Shure Beta 58A however was the star of the day. I did a few test recordings to see how much background noise I would pick up, only to find that its active pick-up area is so close in that it captured my voice beautifully and nothing beyond a few feet away. So I got my vocalisations in a noisy environment with no background contamination. I think the Beta 58A is going to be my new best friend for a while. I have very much neglected many of my microphones over the years tending to do a lot of my work with only one mic. I am now discovering this has been much to my detriment and I am trying to make up for it by really testing out what my other mics are capable of. I also needed some female vocalisations, and with a little help from one of the girls at work I got some suitable material. She had a much softer voice, but even when I increased the amplitude afterward the Beta 58A retained a good clean signal. I am going to start using a new set-up for location recording which I will post up here when I have it finalised. I do however have a new kit bag that fits all my recording gear and is small and lightweight. It makes getting to places to do recordings heaps easier, and having a dedicated bag means I don’t have to repack every time I want to go out. |
AuthorStephan Schütze has been recording sounds for over twenty years. This journal logs his thoughts and experiences Categories
All
Archives
April 2019
|