Cellar Manoeuvres in the Dark

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This past weekend, I was back in Upstate NY again, as it is hard to resist getting out of New York City these days.  Unfortunately, it was raining most of the weekend and we even lost power for over 30 hours.  Instead of lamenting the lack of power, I decided to make lemonade out of lemons and do some recording.

I remembered that the house had storm cellar doors in the basement and I trucked my gear downstairs to record the sound of the heavy rain banging off the big metal doors.  I wish this photo was clear, but, as I mentioned, we had no power and not much light; the little bit of light you see is the light creeping through the edge of the storm cellar doors.  The room with the cellar doors  is separated from the rest of the basement, so that the heavy rain drops reflected all over the narrow closed-in space.

One of the other bonuses of the black out was that all the heavy machinery that makes noise was off: no noisy water heater, walter filters and such means a clean recording.

Recording Geek Note:  Rig consists of Schoeps CMC5 setup for MS, with the MK4 as the mid.  It was all tracked to a Sound Devices 744T at 24/96 in the dark.

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  1. You don’t realise how noisy a house is until you loose power. Then it all goes silent. No fridge hum, no buzzing, no pumps. Just quiet.

    BTW, nice recording. I always enjoy rain recordings

Michael Raphael March 17, 2010
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