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Location
Noosa Queensland
Equipment
Zoom F4
Sennheiser MKH 60
Boom pole array
 
One of the things I really need to learn is, not to keep putting off recording the things that are right in my immediate environment. I kept doing that in Japan thinking “it’s ok, I can record those any day” of course “any day” never comes around and you end up forgetting to record the things which were the easiest to record and really should have been the first things I did.

So to that end I spent some time around the house recording the three sets of wind chimes (it was the perfect day for it with a constant gentle breeze), some large cow bells, and the ceiling fans which proved to be far more interesting than I was expecting. Positioning the microphone in different positions relative to the fans generated a range of different sounds. Positioning below, above and side on to the blades as they rotate all produced different sounds. Some of them were a lot closer to a helicopter rotor sound than I would have expected. This has become a bit of a useful lesson. Never assume a sound being generated will sound the same for every position. Take the time to move around the object generating the sound and see how it changes. This was also very apparent with recording the old Holden cars. The Idle sound coming from the rear near the exhaust was very different from recording at the sides, and then different again from recording at the front.
 
I am still working on recording the cat Oscar. Oscar is a very large muscular Burmese cat. He has a fairly wide range of cat sounds, most of which he produces when you least want him to, like at 4am. However anytime I go near him with the recording equipment I can barely get a squeak or a purr out of him. I am however determined to get a good range of sounds out of him sooner or later.