A Day at the Cricket

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.