Hell Hound

Portrait of Sid the Dog, by Peter König

My friend and designer extraordinaire Jules has a dog named Sidney. Sid’s problem is that he has no idea that he’s a 100-pound pitbull-rottweiler mix. He’s a thick, massive canine with a chest  twice the diameter of mine, yet he has the self-image of a happy-go-lucky, teensy lap dog.

Jules was nice enough to let me do a recording session with Sid to get some elements for some creature sounds. I was after something low and menacing, but that didn’t require too much downward pitch-shifting, the du rigeur method of processing deep creature effects that often muddies up the sound by eliminating higher frequencies critical for realism.

This was my first planned recording session with animals of any sort, and I learned a lot. The biggest lesson of the day? Put dogs on carpet or sound blankets to silence those claws!

All we did was give Sid a rope toy. This rather intense collection of audio samples, unprocessed besides normalization, was the result. (Portrait by Peter König.)

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[Røde NTG-2 mic, Sound Devices 702 recorder]