As a resident of NYC, I’m always looking for ways to get out of town.  Thanks to my in-laws, the Missus and I have a place upstate New York to get away when the grind of NYC starts to get us down.

We get the opportunity to spend a tremendous amount of the weekend watching the Delaware River roll by.  The section of the river that we spend time on divides two small towns in New York and Pennsylvania respectively. If you want to cross state lines you have to cross this bridge:

It is this great old metal bridge that has a metal surface that sort of looks like a cheese grater.  It lets out a great low rumbling hum when cars pass over it.  Back in the winter I made some recordings with hydrophones in the water below, but I wanted to return and record it with my Schoeps MS pair above the water.

In this recording I positioned myself under one end of the bridge and let the traffic roll over me.  This is just a snippet of a place I could spend hours lost in thought.  Who knew cars could be so soothing?

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of Schoeps CMC5’s setup for MS, with the MK4 as the mid. It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/96

Lately I’ve been working on a series of underwater and hydrophone based recordings for a sound library.  One of my first stops was my brother-in-law’s pool for some scuba sounds.

He’s a trained diver and he was nice enough to let me come out for the day and put him through his paces.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t get started until late in the day because of this sound:

I consider it a happy accident.  Initially I was really frustrated because I couldn’t figure out where this low frequency sound was coming from and I needed to record scuba sounds!  I kept looking around and there definitely wasn’t a nuclear sub in the pool!  My brother-in-law and I quickly discovered that a neighbor down the block was having his driveway ripped up and repaved.  All of that low frequency information was traveling from down the street and under the pool.  So what do you do when you have a loud hum?  We went out for lunch and then I took my nephew and niece out for ice-cream.  By the time we returned to the pool we were free and clear of construction hums and we could make all of the bubbling sounds we wanted.

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of 2 Aquarian H2a Hydrophones. It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/96

A few weekends back I got out of New York City with the Missus and headed upstate.  It was a beautiful weekend, but it did rain for a while, which gave me an excuse to do some recordings.  Some family friends have a beatiful old barn on the edge of their property that I have been dying to record in for some time.

The barn has old wooden beams, a metal roof, and a small bat population.  When it started raining, I ran over to start recording, thinking that the metal roof coupled with the acoustics of the interior would lead to some interesting results.

Unfortunately, the rain was a little too light and constant for the impacts on the metal roof to be that interesting, so I was not hopeful when I set up the recorder.  I didn’t think I would get anything worthwhile unless the pattern of the rain shifted.  However, when I got home and started sifting through the recording, I discovered the rain was not the coolest part.  It was the roof itself!  If you listen closely, the roof shifts in the wind and generates wobbly low frequency sounds. Can you say “Roof Drone?”  I had thought I would go home and trash the recording, but am glad I spent the time sifting through all of the content.

Now, I have to go back on a windy day to get just the sounds of the roof moving against the rest of the barn.  In addition, there are occasional bat vocalizations, a few birds, and a couple of planes that are all filtered through the roof and the barn.  It might not be the best result, but it turned out to be a worthy and interesting experiment.

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of Schoeps CMC5’s setup for MS, with the MK4 as the mid. It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/96

I’ve been running this blog for over 3 years now, and it is with great excitement that I announce the establishment of Rabbit Ears Audio.  After years of recording for myself, I’ve decided to launch my own independent SFX library company.

My first library, REA_001 ROCKETS features a number of rockets that I’ve posted previously on this blog, and, in honor of the launch, I’ve decided to put up two of my favorite rockets from the library.

This is an large scale amateur rocket recorded at a close perspective with a pair of Schoeps in an MS configuration.

This is slightly smaller Rocket recorded at a close perspective with a pair of DPA 4060s.

They were truly a blast to record.  Here is a little background from the Rabbit Ears Site:

I recorded these rockets on two separate occasions.  The first session was in Plaster City, California, where temperatures soared to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit before noon.  The second session occurred in Pine Island, New York on an onion farm.

One of the biggest challenges when recording rockets is battling the high SPL and developing strategies to overcome it.  Before I did any recordings, I went to a launch and spent half a day just listening.

After working around lots of hobbyists and their wonderful creations, I have a pretty explosive collection of sounds.  None of my microphones or their owner were harmed in the making of this library.

I’ve been buried under a few work projects lately, so my recording trips have suffered.  This week I wanted to revisit an old favorite of mine: ostriches!  Back in 2008 I was living in Minneapolis and I got a call for Ostriches.  Luckily for me there was an ostrich farm not too far into Wisconsin.  Before I left, I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, so I dragged Rob Byers along for company.  He’s one of my recording buddies.

After we met the woman who ran the farm, I noticed a giant scar on her leg in the shape of an ostrich claw. They kick.  They kicked really hard.  We also quickly learned that the adults only make noise when they are mating (a low hooting noise), and unfortunately we were not that lucky.  We also learned which ones would not be living past the next week (the yearlings):

They barely made a sound, but they did like biting my zeppelin.  I didn’t mind because, I knew they would soon be snack food (“bite away poor fellows”). At that moment I was starting to feel a bit down on my luck since we hadn’t really heard much except the story of how the farm owner got kicked by a yearling.  That was until we discovered the babies!  Not only were they cute, but they made this unearthly chirping sound that I’ll never forget.

When I was working on Radiolab a colleague of mine, actually used them as the basis for the sounds of parasites hanging out inside a large intestine.  I’m good for baby ostriches and parasites.  One of my favorite things about that day was the massive amount of ostrich jerky we left with.  The woman who ran the farm refused to let us leave without 5 pounds of ostrich jerky.

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of Schoeps CMC5’s setup for MS, with the MK4 as the mid. It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/96