Lately, I have been toying around with my tiny DPA 4060 microphones. I’ve been trying to find interesting places to mount them to record a variety of sources in order to get a better feel for them. I’ve owned them for a few years now but I’ve never really pushed them all that hard, so I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to get out and record more.
photo credit: flickr/spatch
It’s almost summer in New York City and a lot of folks here consider Coney Island a great escape. I wanted to record a couple of pass-by’s of the famous Coney Island Cyclone before it got really crazy out there. In just a few weeks the ambience will be filled with crazy amounts of music blasting from all over, so I decided that a mellow weekday was good time to try to capture the rattling and creaking of the historic 1920s roller coaster.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/17225482″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ff7700″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ]I was happy to record it, but I am never getting on that damn thing. Would you?
Recording Geek Note: I stood alongside the coaster with the DPA’s head-mounted and slowly tracked the movement of the coaster with my head. It was tracked to a Sony PCM-M10 with a Sound Devices MP-2 as a front-end.
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Mountain Lake Biological Station
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Bird Deck
One of the things I love about long holiday weekends is that most of my neighbors head out of town. Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend here in the states, and in terms of noise, that means quiet. Not only were the neighbors quiet, but temperatures didn’t peak enough for HVAC units to start kicking on. With quiet in mind,
All Clad
What is that expression about making lemons out of lemonade? Or is it lemonade out of lemons. For the next few weeks my next door neighbors are having their roof and siding redone, and if I am going to have to suffer through it, I might as well get some useful recordings out of it. This recording is from day
This is great. I was at Coney Island in May to try and record the same thing but I could not find a place without music blaring and I left empty handed. Nice work finding a sweet spot.
Wow, very cool and evocative. That last pass-by with no voices was especially clean. From one perspective,one could find it a little bit eerie because one hears screeches and screaming, but little talk and no laughter. Wooden rollercoasters FTW, and thanks for a recording of one of the most famous!
The depth of this recording is amazing. Nice job! One of these days you’ll have to do a post all about your famous DPA hat!
Nicely done Michael, I like the details of the mechanics upfront and the screams verbed out. It’s like if the screams where morphed within the squeaks… Quite jealous of those recordings 😉
Coney Island Cyclone, I won’t chicken out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmwRWaZ_Ubg
Rock,
lcl
Nice One. Bring on the space rock.
I did this one without the hat, but I’m not telling how!
Thanks!
Thanks Nathan.
Ride it. You will fear for your life. That coaster is not safe.
Nice work – you must’ve been positioned really well to have the sound of the roller-coaster ebb and flow like that. Ironic that it sounds more erie the way it lacks the usual screams.
Very special recording. So clear and deep! I really enjoyed it!