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What do you do on a beautifully sunny day when you really need to record some new source material but you also want to try and get some exercise. Simple, you combine everything you need to do and do it all at once. So, I strapped the two DPA 4061 mics to my bike, one near the front derailer and one above the rear derailer. I ran the cables along the frame and put the Zoom H4N into a carry pouch I have mounted on my handlebars. This was a nice secure set-up and meant i could ride easily without having to worry about the equipment at all.  The regular bike path I ride along has a variety of different surfaces as well as plenty of hills so I knew I would get a good range of sounds. I was surprised to find that I actually got some wind noise through the microphones. I think some of it was from my leg moving past the front mounted mic. It wasn't that my leg was moving that fast or creating much wind, I think it was just that it was moving past the microphone very close. There was a little wind when I went down steeper hills as well. I think this is because a bike has such a simple frame that the wind travels past it differently from a car. I have mounted these mics on a car travelling up to 100 Kph with no wind, so obviously the wind movement past the car differed greatly to that of the bike. Overall it was good to get some exersize in the sun and record some useful sounds as well.
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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.  Ice Skating 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 Equipment Zoom H4N Mounted and Zoom H4 MKH60 Boom Pole Set-up I needed some skating sounds for a pitch project I was working on and I also wanted some more skateboard material for the library. Luckily a bunch of guys at work go out pretty regularly with their skateboards at lunchtime down to the nearby skate park. I followed along to see what I could get. I mounted the H4N on the bottom of one of the boards with some Velcro straps. It was generally ok, but meant no rail grinds for the rider. It did capture some very clear samples from the board’s trucks (wheels) it came off once and got a little scratched, but it was otherwise ok. This made me appreciate the more rugged construction of the H4N over the H4 even more. I did have an issue with placing the Velcro. I wanted it nice and tight, but I kept switching the H4N out of record mode with the strap, so I needed to move it slightly. I think this is why it fell off. After a couple of attempts I managed to get it secure so it would not fall off or switch off. I was also using the boom pole to capture extra material. At one stage I got one of the guys to go for a ride while holding the boom pole angled at the board. This got some good material over various surfaces.  Velcor is one of my main tools Capturing grinds and jumps was a little more difficult, and we did end up faking a few extra ones by just holding the board and running it along the rails. This wasn’t because the guys couldn’t grind, it was more for safety and practicality. I needed to get as close to the board as possible to record a good sample, and that became difficult with a real grind. The last thing I wanted to do was trip anyone off their board with a boom pole. One of the guys cracked his board on a jump which sucked, but it did mean I got the sound of him snapping it in half when we got back to the studio later on. This was a good use of time an gave the guys a reason to perform some crazy moves, not that they usually need much excuse.  Rail grinds made to look easy Location Kew and Docklands Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Tripod mount and R09 handheld I had some nice people from the Kew Bowmans club help me this morning by shooting lots of arrows into targets for me while I was recording. Sunday morning is the regular meeting time for the club, and the head of the club Rob McKenzie had been happy for me to come along and have a listen and then he helped me out by doing some shooting for me. There was a freeway very close by which I am worried might have contaminated some of the sounds, but I should have some good material when I sort through it all. I set up the shotgun mic on the tripod so I could position it at the target to record some impact sounds. Then I progressively moved it down the range to record the arrows in flight past the mic at different ranges. Its these more subtle sounds that I think might have issues with the freeway noise. Again I learnt lots about archery in between recording shots. I captured most of the bow firing sounds with the handheld R09 as the Shotgun mic was down range. I plan to buy the new Zoom H4n when it is available in a few weeks and this will give me a third recording option. I a not sure what mic I want to use with the new unit, I will need to do some experimenting to find the best combination of devices. There isn’t really a lot of different sounds with archery. The firing of the arrow, the flight of the arrow and the impact of the arrow are basically it, but I did make sure I captured shots being fired into the tow different target types available as well as a range of three or four different bows and several different types of arrows, so there should be some good material in there when I get to catalogue it.  Kew Bowmans Club Later in the day I tried strapping the R09 under the bonnet of the car we had hired for the weekend. It was just a little Toyota, but I thought this would be a good test of the method. I want to see how well this works for future car recordings. Strapping the unit down was pretty straightforward, but obviously I cant monitor the levels, so I wont get to see if they were good until I download all the sounds and go through them all to catalogue. I have a Nissan Z and a BMW lined up to record soon so I want to get the process working well before I record them.
Finally I also got some female footstep sounds as well. My wife helped me out by wearing a few different pairs of shoes and I followed her round recording her walking on different surfaces. The good thing about the Docklands area near where we are living is that at night its like a ghost town so it’s a great quiet area to do sound recording with no contamination. It also has a good range of surfaces for walking on because they have metal escalators, wooden slate bridges as well as the usual concrete and tile flooring. I’ve been meaning to add women’s shoes to the library for ages so its good to finally get some in there. 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.
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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. 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 Cricket Ground Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array and Roland R09 Handheld Today is going to be the last of my crowd recording sessions. With this material I should have a good cross section of sporting crowd situations and samples. Today was the first one day match between Australia and South Africa for the 2009 season and a pretty big crowd was expected. I wanted to get there early so I could get a good range of crowd sounds as the number of people there would increase over the day with a surge expected around 6.30 pm when people finished work for the day. By the time I got in the game had started and the second over was being bowled. There would have been between 10,000-15,000 people there by that stage.  Melbourne Cricket Ground One of the things I always try to do when I am in a situation where I have pre planned and know I have time to set-up properly is have both the H4 and the R09 running. This increases my chances of catching anything that might be good material. I set the input levels for the R09 at a constant low rate so it can hopefully capture any very loud sounds, and I use the H4 for more specific targeted sounds, often varying the input levels on the H4 through the course of the day. Even when I am relocating from one part of a stadium to another I will usually have one of the devices running just in case something noteworthy comes up. This of course takes its own planning as I was at the MCG for over 6 hours and I needed to ensure I could cover that time with both battery life and recording capacity. Currently the H4 is using a 4 gig SD card which is giving me about 5 hours of recording time at 48 KHz sample rate. I would usually need to change over the batteries if I was going to fill the full five hours. I try to use rechargeable batteries as it can get really expensive otherwise, but I always carry a spare set on me. In the future I plan to get a second H4 but before I do I need to work out the best way to rig it up and what kind of mic set-up I need.  Australia vs South Africa The game progressed as expected. Cricket is a slow sport to watch at the best of times. I got lots of material time wise, but most of it was just background crowd chatter. There were actually less sound events in 6 hours of cricket than 90 minutes of soccer., but I got a fairly good selection of cheers and other crowd related sounds. I relocated at least 5 times in at 6 hour session. I also took something to read with me as even though I was recording for all that time, there was very little for me to need to monitor. I am not a big fan of cricket and it can get a little slow at times so I just relaxed and read my book for a lot of the time. This was a long but pretty easy recording session.
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
Melbourne Equipment Zoom F4 Sennheiser MKH 60 Boom pole array Adding some more sounds to the sports section today. There are going to be a bunch of new sounds for sports over the next few weeks as several of the projects I am working on currently involve sporting sounds. Today it was just some simple sounds of catching various balls. Rugby, soccer and indoor soccer balls all got thrown around a little as I recorded the handling sounds. I did try to record some kicking sounds indoors into a special net but the sounds were very flat. I need to go outside to do this properly so There will be another session next week out in a park somewhere. I am trying to organise some access to various sports events and I have tickets to go to a one day cricket match next week so there will be plenty of stuff there as well. I am always reluctant to record sound indoors without a proper studio (my current workplace doesn't have anything even remotely studio like) reflective sounds and background noise often make it pointless to try and capture material indoors, but depending on the sounds I need and the microphones I use I can often get usable material. Really quiet sounds or sounds with a long duration are not possible, but short sharp impact sounds like catching footballs is pretty easy to record cleanly. The impact itself is loud enough to cover any background noise and the short nature of the sound means there is little chance for contamination. I always try to use an area with the most carpet and soft furniture to absorb reflected sound which I don't want. |
AuthorStephan Schütze has been recording sounds for over twenty years. This journal logs his thoughts and experiences Categories
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