This sound is a field recording of a bee captured in a plastic food bin. It was recorded by placing a contact microphone on the side of the bin, which was tracked at 24 bit/192kHz onto my Sound Devices 702 recorder. The bee was hitting the sides of the bin with his body and wings, producing the warbling and percussive hits. I lowered the pitch of the sound by a full three octaves while keeping the duration the same, which still kept a fair amount of dynamics given the high sample and bit rate of the recording. This is dying to be used in conjunction with an actively-automated Doppler plug-in, but a gent has only so many spare cycles in a day.
No bees were harmed in this recording. The little feller had air holes and he was released after 6 minutes, after which he promptly went back to pollinating my backyard.
An earlier post spurred a couple of commenters to wonder about hearing some sounds from my shovel-in-wheelbarrow recording session pitched down by an octave. I recorded that session at 96kHz, so the sounds could easily manage to be stretched and pitched down.
So, here are the results, as requested. Definitely leans towards a cinematic feel, and I find that sounds like these have 1,001 uses! Enjoy, and happy Pitchshiftember!
The humble Roomba: Only a mistake could make it sound cool.
We own two Roombas. When they’re not battling to the death like robotic Mexican cocks, they clean our floors.
I recorded one and, well, it wasn’t that interesting. A bit whiny. Not at all what one would expect from a 21st century robot: A lot of wide-spectrum noise without a lot of character.
But then I taped a contact microphone on the top of the Roomba…taped rather poorly, in fact. I followed it around all hunched over with a too-short cable, causing the contact mic to occasionally lift up from the Roomba’s chassis. (I could have turned it off to rig it properly, but y’know. Guy thing.) This sloppiness caused a pretty weird warbling as the flat piezo element wobbled around and slightly lifted off the robot’s chassis as it changed directions and the cable to the recorder alternated between taut and slack.
It sounded weird enough to post here, completely unedited other than trimming and normalizing, in all it’s lazy-man’s happy-accident glory.
There is something so primal about fire. Everyone I know considers just sitting and watching/listening to a campfire burn is better than television, and can be done for hours, pleasurably, in silence.
Of course, when I get excited, ideas like physics kind of go out the window, like the whole heat-rising thing…nothing got damaged, but in retrospect a lower position would have allowed the recorder to get closer. I am sure the makers of the Zoom H2 didn’t intend to have its plastic case survive high temperatures.
I recorded the sound of my campfire while backpacking California’s Sierra National Forest and the John Muir Wilderness on a nice, still evening. This particular campfire had a log that made some, uh, gassy emissions, and sounded very much like a milk foamer on an espresso machine. You’ll hear it about halfway through the clip.
I’m bound for the South Island of New Zealand this winter (or, their summer). I’m traveling with the Significant Other, so all I can really bring with me for sound gear is the ol’ Zoom H2 (now with its spiffy new wind-busting afro!). However, the question remains: What are the killer recording opportunities there?
I’ll be exploring the entire nothern coast from Abel Tasman to Akaroa, driving through Otago, and spending many days in the alps, ranging from Doubtful Sound up to to Arthur’s Pass. We’ll be there for three solid weeks.
If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears! Feel free to offer ideas and suggestions in the comments on this post, via Twitter, or at nathan [at] noisejockey [dot] net.
The Bogen Super Clamp held this OktavaMod MK012 right near the action.
I’ve posted before about photographic grip equipment for use in audio recording, but one little widget rises to the top of that list for me: the Bogen Super Clamp. While intended to position cameras and flashguns in unusual places without marring whatever it’s clamped to, the Super Clamp is super fun for audio, too.
Super Clamps come with a stud that locks into the clamp itself, and ends with a 1/4″-20 screw thread. All it takes is an adapter to change that to a more mic-mount-friendly 3/8″ or 5/8″ thread, and as long as everything’s screwed down tight, you can hang mics upside down, on the sides of vehicles, you name it. Combining them with other accessories like umbrella swivel adapters gives you even more mounting flexibility. The padding on their jaws also makes them pretty gentle on whatever you place them on. Just don’t overtighten them on surface that can’t take crushing pressure, like carbon fiber handlebars.
This mounting held pretty well on relatively gentle roads, and took 3 minutes to rig.
It’s large, bombproof, and heavy, so maybe it’s not something you might casually throw in your field recording bag. But if you want to position a mic somewhere that a mic stand can’t go, or shoot an unusual perspective, the Super Clamp can go there. I’ve used it to attach mics in all sorts of odd places. A great way to get some neat ideas is to watch this Chase Jarvis video, in which he uses Super Clamps and the Bogen Magic Arm to get unique point-of-view shots. Extrapolate by replacing the cameras with mics and it gets interesting.
There are other ways to get mics in weird places, too. The Super Clamp is not unique to Bogen: Matthews makes basically the same thing. There are many smaller jobbies, too, such as Cardellini Clamps, but they’re actually more expensive.
I’ll end this post with a sample of me riding around my street…not horribly exciting, but you’ll get the idea. The clip starts with pedaling uphill, then freewheeling on the flats, the disc brakes kicking in, and finally me clipping out of the pedals. The rumbling noises aren’t traffic, but rather the knobby tires rolling on the pavement.
I live near miles and miles of public open space trails, and there’s a ruined hulk of a blue pickup truck a couple of miles from my house. I see it whenever I hike, run, or bike by. It’s been there for years; someone drove it up incredibly steep fire roads and left it.
Some time ago I dragged a field recorder and a windscreen-protected shotgun microphone up those hills and spent an hour milking the rusting chassis for sound. As you can tell by the picture, it doesn’t look like there was much left, but I did get some pretty cool sounds out of it. Like the cigarette machine percussion loop from an earlier post, I’ve assembled the raw sounds into a drum kit. Here’s a quick sample for your  funky, semi-industrial percussion pleasure. No processing other than pitching 2 samples down a bit in the sampler and some compression and EQ in the final mix; it’s rendered as a usable loop, hence the sudden start and stop.
I'm pretty sure this paddleboat was not intended for wilderness exploration.
Before embarking on mountainous backpacking trips, I like to acclimate to the altitude for a day with some light activity. On a recent, trip, my girlfriend and I wanted to do some lake kayaking. Sadly, the sole outfitter in the region didn’t bring their kayaks that season…when offered a paddleboat instead, we shrugged, thought it was incredibly silly, and said, “Sure!”
The next thing we knew, we were out for four hours in this damn thing. We paddled halfway across an alpine lake, and fought 10-knot wind on the return trip in a craft with the hydrodynamics of a brick. The only way we survived was to sustain ourselves by playing Ghost and Twenty Questions like we were eight years old. From those plastic bucket seats, my ass was complaining for days afterwards.
It was a silly, weird, and fun…and oddly mechanical-sounding. There was this constant thrumming that sounded really regular and sustained for a muscle-powered vehicle. Early in the day there was no wind or chop, so I managed to get several minutes’ worth of clean recordings from this thing. It could easily be processed just a little and recontextualized as a mechanical texture for some device or ambience.
I almost didn’t bring my Zoom H2 on this trip, but I’m sure glad I did. I’ll have more examples from this trip in future posts. (Technical note: Dropping six rechargeable batteries at once into a cold mountain stream does not improve battery life.)
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?
eBowing a tensioned cable on a fence gate. I mean, doesn't everyone spend their Sundays doing this?
The eBow has been around for decades, and it does one thing only, albeit very well: It excites metal objects with a magnetic field. It’s meant to be used to get synth tones out of guitars, and used right, it can be beautiful.
“Used right” usually doesn’t apply when I get my hands on such things.
Having purchased an eBow this year, I didn’t sit and play my guitar with it. Instead, I switched it on and walked around the neighborhood looking for guitar-string-like objects that might make even more interesting noises.
I came upon a fence gate that had a tensioned cable secured with a turnbuckle (to keep the large door from warping). While I could barely hear the cable resonate, I could also hear the wood of the door vibrating. To my mind, that meant only one thing: contact microphones.
As you can see from the photo, I taped one contact mic to the turnbuckle, and another to the door. I didn’t want one on the cable to decrease its oscillation. I tracked each contact mic to a separate channel on my field recorder.
I recorded about 16 minutes of pretty interesting tones, but the audio levels were quite low. The hums and drones were nice, but I liked it even better when the cable would strike and vibrate against the eBow itself, adding a sound like metal being stretched and warped. It sounded like a much more aggressive Alan Lamb recording. Perhaps someday I can use it expressively as a layer in some transformative or warping sequence, and certainly chopping it up to microsample it will yield untold button sounds, clicks, wonks, vrrrmmms, and other sonic sweetness.
I layered some of the more dynamic, expressive parts into a short clip that you can check out below.
has been around for decades, and it does one thing only, albeit very well: It excites metal objects with a magnetic field. It’s meant to be used to get synth tones out of guitars, and used right, it can be beautiful.