There are some things I think you would only ever see in Australia, and some only ever in Melbourne. We were out at the Docklands showing Anna's Aunt and Uncle around as they were visitng on holiday so we thought we could have lunch nice and close to home and show them the new areas. As always I was carry a recorder (today it was the H4N) In the public events area there were a bunch of people doing some celebration dances for Chinese new year. This meant we got to stop for a while and watch the dance I managed to record the drums and cymbals they play with the dragons. I have recorded Chinese new yeararade music before, but there are lots of different rhythm patterns and variants so it was good to capture a new one. The dancers were good and it was nice and colorful which is one of the things I love about Chinese new year.

Chinese dragons are not that unusual in Melbourne, we have a big Chinese community and around new years time there are lots of shows on and I think they are a popular and important part of the city, however when you combine them with Morris dancers only about 100 meters away then you have something that doesnt occur in many places.

We arrived at the bar resteraunt we were heading to, only to find a group of morris dancers outside the pub drinking and practising their dances. They had bells strapped to their legs and canes and a couple of people with old accordians. They jumped and pranced about to music that sounded very appropriate for your local pirate party. I set my recorded on a nearby wooden keg (now I am really feeling like I am in pirate land) and recorded a couple of their dance tracks. Its certainly not the type of music I would choose to listen to every day, but it be great to use in the right kind of game project.

After being miserable in Melbourne last year because of all the rain, I was really happy to see it pouring down today.

I got some really good feedback from my brother recently regarding the sounds in the library. He had looked through all the ambiant and environmental sounds and thought that many of them weren't long enough. I think my time in the game industry is responsible for this, as for games we tend to use shorter sound files and edit them to fit them into memory, however for something like film or TV a sound designer may want 3,4 or 5 minutes of a continuous atmophere to use in a scene. As a result I plan to go out and rerecord alot of my more common elemental material such as waves ,wind and rain. Today it was rain's turn.

It was raining heavily after a few days of hot weather, so I stood outside the studio on a busy Melbourne street and recorded the people and traffic and the rain. Then I opened my umbrella and stood int he rain for 5 minutes or so to recordthe sound or rain on the umbrella. Finally I went up onto the roof of our building and was lucky to capture a couple of nice thunder claps.
For thr moment at least I plan on making use of the weather any time it rains. I am sure I will get sick of the rain quickly enough once winter turns up.

I finally found some very old source material I have been looking for for ages. I knew I had it somewhere and I wanted to add it to the library. Years ago I was working on a pitch for a game project that subsequently went nowhere, but I did enjoy making some of the sounds for it. One of the primary sounds was a giant explosive scream that the main character had as an ability. It was supposed to be pretty much the biggest thing int he game and as such needed a big sound. I spent some time at home screaming into a mic to get some good raw material to work from. It was that the screams are particularly brilliant, although I do think they worked fairly well, it is more that it took over a week for my throat to heal as I seriously damaged it from screaming so loud. For this reason alone I wanted to make sure the sounds found their way into the library because I am certainly not going to try and record them again.

Looking back at the old project files I can see how I put it together and even now its not too bad an end result. I think I was having so much fun working on it that I really put a lot of effort into the final sound. This would have been 8 years ago at least and back then I didn't spend the same amount of time on recording raw material, so I am really glad I found the old source material for this. I won't add the final sound to the library, but I will put it hear as a taste of some of the crazy things I used to get up to working on pitch ideas.

Location
Melbourne
Library update

I now have the database tool in my hot little hands and after some tweaking will be ready to start inputting all the data for the current library sounds. Thats nearly 13,000 sounds to be added to the database. As soona s that is done the full Sound Library website will be ready to go live. On target for a Febuary launch. I am very happy to be so close to finally going live with the full site.

As part of preparing the library for launch I have been going through and checking all the sounds, making sure they are levelled well and generally have no problems. Initially I did not included many stereo sounds in the library, but I have been going through all the raw material and where available replacing the sounds I down mixed to mono with stereo versions.

Initially I think I was trying to reduce file sizes as most of the ambiance sounds were already quite long, but the ambiances also benefit more from being stereo than most other sounds. I really need to get a stereo shotgun mic so I can record the majority of my material in stereo initially as currently most of my samples are recorded in mono. I would not always choose to include stereo versions of all sounds, but I do think I should increase my options when recording raw material. Over the years I have evolved the way in which I record my raw material with a wider range of micrphones avaibale and better equipment to capture sounds, but there will always be room for imporvement, so this year I plan to add both stereo and surround sound versions of a range of material.

Location
Melbourne
Equipment
Zoom H4N
H2a XRL

Well this turned out to be a disappointing experiment. I have been thinking about doing a lot more recording with the hydrophone as I have captured some great material and want to continue to see what interesting results I can come up with recording under water. I decided to see if I could capture the sounds of ice cracking as it froze and melted so I placed the hydrophone into a plastic container, filled it with water and put it in the fridge. I attached the H4N to the mains power supply so it could run without fear of battery failure and left it on all night. 5 hours worth of recording later I an have nothing at all except the background hum of the refrigerator. Ok, so maybe ice doesn’t make much noise while its freezing, but I thought at least it would crackle and snap as it thawed out. So the following night I took the whole lot out of the freezer and left it to melt, again with the recorder running. Sadly I recorded another 5 hours of absolutely nothing. I was disappointed, but more than that I was very surprised, I really thought there would be some sound generated as the ice melted. I am going to do some more tests on this, but so far it has been a bit of a failure.

On a more positive note I did record a train today. There is a major freight terminal not far from where we live and some pretty big freight trains head out across the creak at the edge of the terminal. This means they spend several minutes clunking across the old metal bridge which makes a great sound. Anna and I were going for a walk as one went past so I got out the Zoom H4N which I was carrying and got some material. The sound these things make is pretty impressive and I want to find out if there is a regular schedule for them so I can bring down all my gear and do a proper recording session. Placing some mics right on the edge of the bridge would get some awesome sounds as these trains can be really heavy. For today I got a good short sample that I will use as motivation to get more.

Location
Melbourne
Equipment
Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop

I am continuing the process of creating some more sounds through manipulating recorded material. I have been getting some excellent and surprising results from stretching the sound files. In some cases I am using extreme stretch functions to create new sounds and the results have been a lot of fun. Most of the resulting sounds have a ghostly quality to them, and many of them would be very useful for science fiction or fantasy type sound effects. The most surprising result was a series of sounds that sound very much like whale song, but with a metallic quality, so I named them all Cyber whale calls. I’m sure they will be very useful for all those people who need the sound for a cybernetic whale singing. I still want to add more melee weapon sounding effects and a new task for next week is to try and create sounds for magic and spell effects, I have never created anything of this nature so it will be a good challenge for the week.

Location
Melbourne
Update

Back to Melbourne and back to work for the new year. I have now set myself a firm deadline on the website. For various reasons I have very good motivation to get everything finalized and up and running. It has been a lot of work so far but January is going to be even worse as I try to get it all finished. I plan on having the entire website including the fully functioning sound library launched before the end of Febuary 2010. There is still a lot of work to go and I have a variety of other things I need to get done this month as well, so January is going to be a busy month. I hope it all comes together so that I can finally launch Sound Library and make it available to everyone.

Location
Noosa North Shore
Equipment
Zoom H4N
DPA 4061

What a great way to spend the last day of the year. Anna and I went horse riding along the beach just north of Noosa on the North Shore. You have to get a ferry across the river with your car and this is where the beach highway starts and heads north. We only went just across the river to where the horse rides started and then we rode for two hours out to the beach and along. I attached the two DPA 4061 mics to my belt to see if I could capture any of the sounds of being on the horse. I knew I wasn’t likely to record much, but I thought maybe I could record some of the clinking and creaking of the saddle and other bits. Sadly this was another failed session as all I really recorded was my pouch bouncing off the mics, possibly useful for something, but not really very horsie.

The ride itself was one of the best things we have done, it was so nice to ride along the beach in the surf and the sun. I hope that this is a sign of things to come for 2010, because if it is then next year is going to be a fantastic year.
I think this is a good place to say Happy New Year to everyone, I hope 2010 is a year of great opportunity for everyone and that we can all live happily and safely through another year.

Location
Rainbow Beach Queensland
Equipment
Zoom H4N
H2a XLR

Today is our last full day with the hire car so we decided to go for a drive north. We drove through Gympie and up to an area called Rainbow Beach. This is part of the area near Fraser Island and the beaches are so huge that they also function as a highway to travel north. Only 4 wheel drive vehicles can use the beach road, but it is such a popular area that many people make use of it.
The beaches themselves are really beautiful at this time of the year. We decided to go for a walk along the beach because the weather was quite cloudy. I took the hydrophone along because I have never thrown it into surf before and I was curious what sounds I would get. After walking for a while I started to drop the mic into the waters as we walked. I captured some pretty good wave sounds but I also captured a lot of noise as the undertow of the receding waves would pull the mic along on the sandy bottom, so I recorded lots of scratchy sand sound. The sand noise wasn’t really usable, but I did get lots of great wave sounds. While we were walking the sun came out and the sky cleared so we got our towels and went for a swim, the water is fantastic and warm in this area and it was nice to cool off.

One of the recurring issues with recording underwater is the large extreme range of sound levels that occur. For instance a small wave will create a woosh and some bubble sounds and be fairly quiet, however a large wave crashing is extremely loud with the hydrophone. This means I either need to constantly alter my input levels or decide I am going to try and capture either one or the other. I plan on getting an inline pad unit for my gear. This is essentially a small plug that is placed between the microphone and the recording device that reduces the input level by a certain level (in this case 20dB) with two inputs I can put the pad on one of the line in inputs and use that channel to captrue the loud waves while still capturing the quieter waves with the other channel. I will need to investiget this further inthe new year.

Location
Noosa Queensland
Equipment
Zoom H4N
NTG3 & DPA 4061
Single hand setup

Anna and her mother have gone down to Brisbane for the day so I am going to use the time to collect a few sounds that I have been thinking about since we arrived in Noosa. Like many houses in hot climates the house here has ceiling fans in most rooms. On the high setting the fans rotate pretty quickly and one in particular sounds a little like a helicopter in stealth mode. I made sure I captured some material from different angles as the sound generated from below is quite different from when the mic is positioned above the blades. Even at right angles and close to the blades you get a different sound. This material would be perfect to use for a slow motion clip of a helicopter flying or something similar.

Next it was Dotti’s turn. She doesn’t bark very often but I have captured a few barks since we came up here. I wanted to record her panting as she is a fairly large dog and with the temperature being typical summer weather she spends a lot of time panting, so I got her to sit still while I stuck a mic in front of her nose. I don’t think animals like having a big fluffy mic in their face, but she was well behaved and I got some good material. As usual capturing animal sounds is a real challenge so I will always spend the time to grab anything that might be a chance for a good recording.