Just a quick announcement that my latest album, Dissolver, is now available as a limited-edition CD, hand-signed, hand-numbered, with an exclusive limited edition sticker. This run of 100 won’t last long, and when it’s gone, that’s it.
Nab you one today, son! More details here.
| No Comments »I found myself at Jack London Square in Oakland during San Francisco Fleet Week. The majestic Lady Washington was in port, so I skulked around with my Sony PCM-D50 field recorder (I was there for other purposes, so I wasn’t toting around my full field recording kit).
It was a foggy morning and the air was still, and the ship wasn’t really making any sound. Its dock, though, sure was. It wound up being one of my favorite sounds in some time, between the metal strains, the rubbing of rubber, and the lapping of water.
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Even more interesting was the jazz quartet that set up mid-deck on the Lady Washington around lunchtime. I don’t know what they were playing, but here it is, regardless, recorded about 60′ away. Loads of people to the right of the stereo field, nothing but open bay to the left.
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MY TAX DOLLARS…!!!!
When I was a kid, I loved jets. Like most boys, I seemed to love vehicles of all sorts. That all waned as I got older, but fast fighter jets are pretty impressive machine…even if the US Navy’s Blue Angels make my blood boil with their noise, and when I think that my tax dollars pay for all that jet fuel in their F/A-18 Hornets.
Nevertheless, as an audio recordist, jet fly-bys aren’t that easy to get on cue. So, every year, I try to record the Blue Angels over San Francisco during Fleet Week. I always say I’ll go somewhere and record them, but life gets in the way on the weekends. But Thursday and Friday beforehand, they do practice runs over the city.
I planned to go onto the roof of my workplace, but a bunch of tech hipsters got there first: Too much talking and reaction sounds. So I just stuck my Sony PCM-D50 out the window, in a small channel between skyscrapers.
When these things scream by, I was measuring between 40dB and 50dB over the background noise level…which, in an urban area is already between 40 and 70dBA. The PCM-D50 has pretty bad limiting – it actually is always recording at two different levels, and fades between the two, so it’s not even a real limiter. So you need to set your levels very carefully. I did a test on Thursday to get just two fly-bys on Friday that were relatively clean.
I liked how the sounds were rendered. The reverb off the tall buildings was nice, even though the background noise masked some of the jets’ approach. But in a city of 760,000 people, you take what you can get…
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Paul Virostek of Creative Field Recording, focuses more on approach and technique than equipment, which I think is entirely appropriate. It’s all too easy to get caught in the vortex of gear over doing creative and innovative things with it.
However, it’s always interesting to know what people do use, and why, and what informed their decisions in doing so. To that end, Paul is in the midst of “A Month of Field Recording,†and yours truly was the latest to be profiled, among such field recordist luminaries as Frank Bry, Watson Wu, and many others.
I’m deeply humbled to have been asked to contribute to this series, and thank Paul for the opportunity. What’s more, I also need to thank the online recordist and sound design community, without whom I’d basically know nothing.  More than half of those being profiled by Paul this month are people who have exhibited nothing but excitement and patience in fielding my questions to them about gear, practice, and theory.
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