I’ve been known to record a few ambiences from my Brooklyn apartment over the years. Hurricane Sandy is on her way, and there is not much going on outside … yet.

Here’s a bit of ambience I recorded last week during a short rainstorm:

Light rain was falling, a small bird chirped away, and the occasional car rolled by on the street. This recording was made around rush hour, and I’m struck by the relative quiet. We’ll see what Sandy brings tomorrow.

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 with a Cooper CS–104 as a front end.

There has been a fair bit of discussion on twitter recently about a portable recorders that work well with small external preamps. This conversation comes up from time to time as gear gets smaller and smaller. My main rig is a Sound Devices 744T with a Cooper CS-104 running as a front end. While the Cooper adds a fair bit of weight and bulk to my bag, I’m always glad that I have it with me. It is much warmer than the 744T and I find that I can push it a fair bit as well. In really quiet environments I can push the gain on the Cooper without really hearing the gear. I could go on and on about the merits of the cooper and lament that Andy Cooper is out of the business, but alas that is not what this post is about. It’s about compact gear.

The compact rig that I’ve settled on when I have to do stealth recording is a pair of DPA 4060s, a Sound Devices MP-2 (pdf) and a Sony PCM-10. The PCM-10 gets fed via the tape out on the MP-2. The DPAs are often head mounted and all of the gear sits in a bag around my waist. I cut little holes in the sides of the bag for cable routing. It’s actually quite useful to use a waist bag like that when making clandestine recordings because you look like a giant tourist! No one ever thinks a tourist is up to no good.

It is rare that I ever take this rig out with any other microphones because if I’m going to take out a large zeppelin, I’ll most likely take out the bigger and heavier stuff. All of the talk on twitter made me realize that I hadn’t taken out this small rig in a little while, so I decided to take it for a spin in mid-town:

I narrowed the image a bit, which always makes me happy.
Recording Geek Note: Recorded with DPA 4060′s head-mounted. It was tracked to a Sony PCM-M10 with a Sound Devices MP-2 as a front-end.

Summer is winding down here on the east coast and one of the iconic sounds of summer in New York City is the sound handball on concrete and asphalt. I don’t know what the statistics are, but if you wander around New York City long enough you’ll start to notice that most parks have multiple handball courts. Somewhere in history of New York, handball managed to become the local sport of champions.

Earlier this summer I took a couple of day trips out to Coney Island and just below the boardwalk, right off the beach is a large slab with about 10 handballs courts. Most of the courts were active when I started to record, and pace of the games slowly began to ramp up. The US Open has nothing on these handball players.

Recording Geek Note:  All the crazy handball was recorded with a pair of DPA 4060s tracked to a Sony PCM-M10 with a Sound Devices MP-2 as a front end.

photo credit/kramchang

I recently took a trip to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York.  If you have ever passed through that terminal, you know that it does not possess many redeeming qualities.  I really cannot think of one.  The terminal is filled with bad 70s decor and horrible lighting.  On a given weekday, the terminal hosts over 7000 buses, and over 200,000 people.  One would think with that many visitors it would be a nice place to pass through, but that is far from the case.

I popped in around midday on a Wednesday to try and catch the terminal at a less busy time so I could get a sense of the space.  I hate muzak, but I do love the way the music is reflecting off the bad brown 70s tile and the high ceilings.

Ultimately for me, it was a chance to listen to a place, normally packed with commuters, in a quieter setting.

Recording Geek Note:  Rig consists of a pair of DPA 4060 mounted stealthily in a hat.  It was all tracked to a Sony PCM-M10, with Sound Devices MP2

This post will be a little short on copy as I’ll let the sounds and the killer photos speak for themselves.  I would like to thank my brother, Dave for the  photos in this week’s post.  You can check out more of his work here.

Over the last few weeks I have been running around NYC recording in various locations, including Washington Square Park.  I planted myself on a park bench and went into record.

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Fall has arrived in New York, but, as you can hear, it hasn’t kept folks out of the parks in the city.  Any respite from tiny hole-in-the-wall apartments is a welcome one.