A personal journey through sound.

Metal Manipulations & Rusty Resonance

Posted: August 16th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: field recording, sound design
Crusty things make tastier sounds!

Crusty things make tastier sounds!

The sound of metal resonating, scraping, straining…doggone it, I just cannot get enough of this stuff.

Doing yardwork one weekend, I noticed my shovel made a great sound as I was scraping soil out of our wheelbarrow. So, naturally, I dragged my wheelbarrow inside our shed, put a large-condenser microphone over it, grabbed the shovel, and pushed its flat blade around the wheelbarrow in various shapes, with and without dirt, for about 20 minutes.

To me, the sounds were evocative of ancient portals, rusted ship doors opening and closing, or the hull of a ship groaning under pressure. What does it make you think of?

Highlights from this session are below!

Resonant Metal: Shovel scraping inside of wheelbarrow by noisejockey
[Røde NT1a mic into Fostex FR2-LE recorder]

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3 Comments on “Metal Manipulations & Rusty Resonance”

  1. 1 Michael Maroussas said at 1:42 am on August 17th, 2009:

    totally agree – and you can also get great results with metal by recording these sounds at 96k then importing them into a 48k pro tools session so they play at the wrong (slower) speed. (add don’t convert on the import audio page)

  2. 2 Michael said at 5:56 pm on August 18th, 2009:

    I would love to hear these sounds dropped into the 48k session that Michael suggests.

    Great sounding stuff.

  3. 3 marty said at 12:55 pm on September 1st, 2009:

    sounds like robo-whale songs


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