Mating by the Interstate
An audio experience:
Showing posts with label Sound. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sound. Show all posts
Friday, February 18, 2011
Thursday, November 12, 2009
The Ocean
Sit back and relax. Here is one big 8 minute wild track of the ocean, composed of several smaller clips recorded for possible use in Todd Tinkham's Southland of the Heart.
Choppers!
Two Blackhawk helicopters fly over the beach during shooting of the final scenes of Todd Tinkham's Southland of the Heart.
Friday, July 31, 2009
The Housemate Sessions go Mellow
I edited four more of Housemate D's songs today. They are very mellow. I'll just put up two of them here.
For other installments in The Housemate Sessions, click my Music subject.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Night, On our Porch
At night the insects are like maracas intent on torture, and the sound of traffic looms close, as if the interstate has sidled up the hill like a snake. You can hear frogs too, and at least one quick owl's shriek.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Happy Memorial Day
Our housemate sessions produced a song about one Memorial Day. Here it is as composed and performed by Housemate D
And here's another, sort of a gritty ballad
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The Housemate Sessions Vol. II
You might recall from a previous post that Housemate D effing rocks. Now I bring you the results of our second session, held a year and a half after that first one.
This time, instead of the dining room, it was in Elrond Hubbard World Headquarters (i.e. my bedroom); instead of being spontaneous, we had a few weeks of yelling back and forth through the house, "When you wanna do this recording / I don't know, maybe next Tuesday . . ." which afforded some time for practice and planning; and instead of using rented equipment home for just one night before doing this shoot the following day, it was my own equipment, purchased in February and still hardly used because this year has been so slow.
Though April was moderately busy -- with a shoot for the crime show, a week doing promos for a local TV station, two days doing interviews for John Deere, and a day each on an instructional video, a testimonial from this Olympic athlete, a conference hosted by this local think tank -- mostly I used the gear owned by the people hiring me. But that athlete testimonial did use my gear, and the tiny Countryman mic performed beautifully. It even sounded better on the indoor interview than the Sanken CS-3e mini shotgun boom mic. This boom mic is supposed to handle reverberating interiors better than a Sennheiser 416, but it did pick up some funny reverb in that little room in the track building. This reverb I didn't even notice until I got home and played back some of the backup recordings. It's a hazard of listening to one mic in each ear on set. You don't necessarily hear either one in much detail. Speaking of reverb, I with I could add a little to the voice in these recordings. My free software, Audacity, is pretty cool, but has no reverb effect. When I get real audio software someday, I will go back and add reverb to the voice.
For making backup recordings on set, I have a Zaxcom ZFR100. It is small and seems very durable, and it can jam timecode from cameras and other recorders. Its connectors are positioned in a weird way on it though, so despite being small, it is very awkward in the bag.
I used the Zaxcom for backing up these recordings, but for the primary recording I used my Sound Devices USBPre. I recommend this for anyone who wants to record just 1 or 2 tracks of audio in the computer. It is a wonderful analog/digital converter. When I play CD's in the computer and run the audio through it, it sounds better than my expensive stereo system purchased 20 years ago.
For the instrumental recordings you are hearing, I put two mics on the guitar: the Sanken CS-3e, and my Sanken CS-1, a secret weapon purchased on ebay for indoor booming when there's time to switch out from the CS-3e mini shotgun. Using the two mics gives sort of a fake stereo effect.
But when there's singing, I had to put the CS-3e on the voice, while leaving the CS-1 on the guitar. This rendered two fairly flat sounding mono tracks. However, what you are hearing is a little more lively than two mono tracks. Getting this slight liveliness into the recording took lots of experimenting. Much of the past few weeks of sitting at home not working has been spent fussing with equalization and compression (both of which I don't know much about but I'm learning), going on the theory that if I could make the guitar and voice sound a little different in each ear, then overall it would sound sort of stereo-ish.
In fact, here's what a portion of the next clip sounds like as recorded, with each mic relegated just to one speaker.
And here it is with the fake stereo treatment I finally settled on. Can you guess what the treatment is?
I love how Housemate D just jumps into improvisations like the instrumentals on here. I swear, all but one of these recordings is the first and only take. Only this song you just heard required several takes; and at that, what you hear is a single take, not something edited together. He just sits in his room and plays these things, but he doesn't practice much -- maybe just 15 minutes here and there before heading out to the library. He doesn't have time for serious guitar playing and he has nearly no formal training. He was a star law student and argued a case before Justice Anton Scalia in a mock court a few months ago, for chrissakes. And yet, listen to how he varies his chords and uses inner (instrumental) voices on all these songs. This is not your average strum-and-humdrum at the local cafe. This is more like Strum und Drang.
I knew the instrumentals were improvised, but in the midst of making these recordings I asked where he had gotten the songs. "I just made them up," he said.
When? I had never heard these songs coming from his room. But when the mics were on, he had them ready, enough to fill an audio CD. And then, two weeks after that, we did another session where he laid down a whole nother CD's worth. I have not started editing them yet. That is my next task, and there is some more seriously interesting stuff there.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Tree Frogs
I'm gonna get arrested doing this someday. This was recorded in a neighborhood on the way home from dance practice tonight. I took the segments with the least traffic, but you can still hear some.
Here's a fun thing to do on a slow Saturday night. Play one of these tracks and a river track from the previous entry at the same time. Voila, noisy frogs by the riverside! Add some nighttime insects from this entry (load in a different tab or window) and play all three simultaneously for true audio wackiness!
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
This Whole Media Thing is Getting Out of Hand
It's gotten so any loser can record himself and post it on the 'net. I recently purchased these cool mics for my work, and a housemate went and used them to record himself on some creaky out-of-tune piano where his girlfriend is house sitting. Took him like an hour of egregiously missing notes to finally get this overly cautious rendition out, and it's still ragged and misses notes. Well. There's probably a better playing of the piano solo in one of the takes, but who wants to dig through an hour of media to find it.
Oh, and this is Elton John's "Rock Me When He's Gone," in case anyone cares about hearing it played well.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Sometimes I Think They Curse Too Much
I fear the dean will walk in. "Yes sir. This is a 'sound exercise.' No sir, I was not aware of the off-color nature of this song. I only listen to the peaks on top of the audio and the spaces between the sounds, and I teach them to do the same. It's like with lifeguarding. You don't want to watch the people. You want to watch the spaces between the people, because that's where the drowners are."
We had taken the midterm tests, and they had done surprisingly well on it. We were left with that age-old bane of all teachers -- extra time. So I said, let's record something someone may want to listen to, for a change. Let's get two mics on this. Let's get them on stands (something they had not done yet). Let's crowd some sound blankets around this to reduce the awful reverb that we have in our "lighting lab," not called a sound stage because my great-grandpa's outhouse was more of a sound stage than this. Chop-chop, we're burning daylight, I said. Warren, Brian needs another set of headphones. Go get them. Warren, we need more cables. Go get them.
Warren has spent his life standing by. It's maddening until you learn to just order him around.
Meanwhile, Eli tuned his stuff up while we lit and miced around him, and when we got things rolling, this is what came out, in just one take. Then we were out of time and had to wrap it up and go home.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
More Night Sounds from the Other Side of the Orbit
Last summer I posted some sounds of tree frogs and cicadas I had recorded. Adam Schultz suggested I post some more in the dead of winter, when maybe we are missing such noises, so here you go. This audio clip is shorter than a minute, and unlike the previous one, uses some compression to pull the quieter mating calls out from the depths of the forest and cram them into your speakers, along with a little more air conditioner or nearby road noise.
Well, I reckon I've just been Mr. Audio/Visual lately, eh?
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Housemate D Effing Rocks
Housemate K says she likes to hear it when she comes home. When was the last time you heard a housemate say she likes to hear noise made by another? D does this in his room when he's taking a study break. The law texts are put aside and he doesn't want to fuss with music or charts. He just jumps in, no parachute, and lets fly with something like this.
I don't hear him doing technical exercises, like the scales and other patterns I used to practice on the piano. His idea drives him and his fingers have to keep up. It gives him that sort of "finding his way" kind of feeling like, I don't know, Jimmy Page's? I may have Rocktoberized the year (I can't believe it's Novendrix already!), but I don't know guitar music that well.
Having D around kind of makes up for the time a member of this band came to interview for a space in our house and we didn't have him move in. He had no references except for his father back home, said he was here to play in the band, and was living with his girlfriend who was also in the band. He could tell "by her fits and tantrums," he said, that she wanted him to have his own space. The whole thing sounded a little shaky to me. I had not heard of the band at the time. And also, the housemate whom he was supposed to replace ended up not moving out for another two months after he had said he would, and by then the prospective found another apartment.
Right about that time, a guy from Minnesota was emailing me to ask about working for two days on a documentary about a band that sounded familiar. I checked back on the prospective housemate's emails and saw that it was his band.
So the documentary maker and I go out to the local bus station to shoot this band doing it's weekly gig there. The prospective's girlfriend starts playing banjo and singing, and this other guy starts fiddling, and the prospective starts dancing around with his harmonica and his jug, and they are amazing and I'm wrestling with the boom and audio levels thinking, "Aw damn, I could have lived with this guy? I effed up."
You know what else is effed up? This site, Twango, where I stream sound from, lowers the pitch of everything. I play the mp3 off my desktop, and it sounds fine. I upload it and play it off the site, and it is definitely lower and I wonder why D's voice sounds more bassy. Anyone got any ideas? Where else should I be streaming stuff from?
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Froggy Went A-Courtin'
Not Safe for Work!
. . . unless you want your co-workers to think you've just opened a jar of fresh summer night air. This is over ten minutes long.
A plane flies through at the beginning. Listen for some kind of weird phase effect in the left speaker on the plane sound. There was the wall of a house behind me, to block some road noise, so maybe it was reflection off this wall that was causing this phase shift, if that is what it is.
About one-third in, there's an unidentified knocking noise in the left speaker from the woods. It is hard to hear, and it does not sound human, unless it's the Blair Witch. Soon after that, there's one slap of one Birkenstock sole, mine yes, against the concrete underfoot. There are some distant cars, and you might be able to hear the neighbor's air conditioning under all the commotion, but this might have been lost in the data compression.
I don't mean my neighbor. This was not recorded at my house, or there would have been interstate traffic overhanging the whole thing.
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