I initially planned to go outside of Lewes to Southease, away from towns by the river that runs through Lewes. Unfortunately I had some other things to do in the morning last sunday and a few trains were cancelled, so in fear of recording in the dark I didn’t stray too far down a countryside walk to Southease from Lewes and recorded quite close to the quiant and slightly-unnerving-in-its-posh-ness town. I really should have gone on a weekday in the morning, as I was contending with a lot of family walking traffic. Which often ruined potentially good recording spots and made this recording session slightly more stressful than it needed to be.
For this session I used some AKG DPA’s lent to me by Michael & Rory and a hydrophone.
I was impressed by the versatility of the DPAs, the initial set up was complicated, but I found I was way less likely to ruin a take with the coathanger technique and will probably always use them in this way from now on. Sound Devices interface would’ve made the sounds I captured even better and look forward to trying that in the future. Due to the time I picked, it was hard for me to get anything that I could possibly use in relation to the pond scenes in Solaris so again, when that was of the cards, I concentrated more on capturing specific sound sources, which rendered the DPA’s less useable than the inbuilt DR 40x mics and the hydrophone, also, due to the preamps not being great for input mics, I find the DR-40xs sound usually better in terms of clarity. I think for capturing atmos for a pond scene, which is going to be very quite, I should be using a better pre amp.
Here is a test recording with the lav mics, its not quite useable with the kids playing in the background for Solaris. There are kids in the scene however so maybe I could get away with it. It’s quite noisy, I tried to turn up the gain even higher in the next recording which is very noisy.
I got very close to this stream and hung the lavaliers close by, the gain was too high so the preamps are noisy, whereas in the last recording, the sound was more natural and close to a human ear, I don’t think lavalier’s are as useful in this setting. In future I would use a cardioid microphone on the stream, with potentially multichannel with some lavaliers picking up more of the surround area. My TASCAM does have this multitrack function so might try that in the future.
The best recordings I got from the afternoon were from drainage from the river Ouse.
This Hydrophone recording is very complex and interesting to me. I think this could be useful in sound design as it’s not necessarily a natural running water sound. I have messed around with recording this stream in different formats, including a cardioid right next to it and also tried pitching down and distorting the Hydrophone recording.
I was very happy with the complexity of this multi-channel recording with X-Y TASCAM DR 40X + Mono hydrophone signal and will definitely be playing around with multichannel capture in future.
Pre-warning this last one is louder… Found a very small mechanical water level
This sound would have been MUCH more preferable with the TASCAM DR-40X as it’s a very directional sound – so lesson learnt there. I am drawn to this drone-like mechanical sounds resounding in a ‘nature’. Like the drain pipe I found in my last recording session in Glynde. I think when in doubt. With the multichannel recordings. I can just capture both and thats what I need to start doing. I probably should invest in some sort of stand for my field recorder so I am not holding things constantly during a recording session. I also would like to try these lav mics with a sound devices interface and hear how sensitive they can get – somewhere way more remote and potentially paired with some kind of shotgun microphone for a focal point. I was thinking about EQ in reference to stereo and how it’s best to have less bass in hard panned things for ear-fatigue. In that sense. Perhaps some kind of mono-shotgun picking up the low end of a particular scene might help centre the stereo image.
Experimenting with the coathanger lav microphones. I should have tried a multi-channel recording here also. But it wouldn’t have mattered as at this point in the day lots of families were going for walks and just generally there was no way to avoid kids screaming every 30 seconds. Something to consider for my next session – avoid the weekends as families, not just field recordists like to go on walks too.