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]

Immersion

This little device was surprisingly expressive.

Of course, the first thing a budding content gatherer does is to collect sounds and images around them, usually found in the home. Me, I went through power tools, my cats, rain outside, the toilet flushing…you name it, that day, it got committed to disk on my first recorder, the Zoom H2.

The thing that I discovered that made a great sound, that perhaps not everyone has lying around, is an immersion blender. Its variable speed dial made a nice sound even cooler once some speeds started resonating the plastic grip in a pretty insane way. Its tiny blades spun fast enough that they pushed a lot of air around, making for overly rumbly recordings near the business end. Ultimately, the best sound was where the shaft met the grip, mic perpendicular to the axis of the shaft.

Could it be used as a high-tech servo sound? Alien force field? A Mark V anti-gravity fargschnottle? Only further DSP can decide…

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[Zoom H2, 90°-spread front mic pair]

The Gateway Drug: Samson Zoom H2

(Part 1 of a 3-part series: Part 2 | Part 3)

The ultimate rule of gathering, be it audio, photography, video, or butterflies, is this: The best tool in the world is the one you have with you. (Not sure who came up with this first, but I heard it initally from Chase Jarvis.)

The humble Zoom H2; even with higher-tech alternatives, still a viable tool.

My first dedicated audio recorder was the Samson Zoom H2, a cheap plastic box packed with four microphone capsules and a teensy screen. Its quirks and dull sound, however, are secondary to its pocket-sized form factor that lets you record stereo (or even semi-surround, using all four mics at once) literally anywhere. I’ve captured tons of sounds with the H2 that I’ve had missed if I carried more “serious” audio equipment with me (which I’ve since upgraded to, and you’ll read more about in the coming weeks).

One such example is this slice of urban ambience, replete with a heated street argument, shot out of a third-story window in San Francisco’s Mission District.

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[Zoom H2, 120°-spread rear mic pair]