Saw Louder, We Can't Hear You

I want to start this post off by saying that our sound studio is no where near as acoustically treated as it needs to be. We know this and we want to fix it, but it is completely out of the question with the budget right now.

With that being said, the past two weeks they have been doing construction in our building. This week hasn't been terrible, a few knocks every now and again, but it is still extremely annoying when working with audio. Last week was absolutely terrible though. I'm not exactly sure what they were doing, possibly sawing through metal beams to cut doors or whatnot, but we couldn't even think about working on sound. This is a little taste of what we listened to for a few days straight in the studio.

  Construction sawing behind wall by Googe


Recording Notes: Recorded with a Zoom H1

Snowocalypse Atlanta 2011

Here in Georgia, we don't get snow often. When we do, no one knows how to handle it and everything shuts down. The people that try to get out and drive in it either don't know how to drive in the snow, or end up being the victim of someone who doesn't know how to drive in the snow. For this reason, I always "opt" to stay home and let the impending doom pass. By "opt" I really mean that I am forced to, seeing that my subdivision contains many shaded hills that never unfreeze.

We've had a few inches of snow on the ground for a couple days now. Which means that I have had a couple days of not being able to get to the studio. Since we don't get snow very often I took this time to get some recordings of footsteps and body falls in the snow.


Snowsteps by Googe

Snow Bodyfalls by Googe

Recording Notes: Recorded with a Rode NTG3 into a Zoom H4n. The body falls were created using the standard technique of packing a duffel bag with some books and throwing it around.

The Cry of Electronics

Do you think you know what your electronics sound like? I doubt you know what they really sound like unless you have attached a telephone pickup coil to them or ran a guitar pickup over them.

I have had one of these telephone pickup coils for a while, but had used it minimally until recently. I was inspired to mess around more with this wonderful piece of equipment after reading Jean-Eduard Miclot's blog post Electromagnetism and seeing Richard Devine at the Propellerhead Producers Conference last weekend where he talked briefly about the pickups. If you've never used one of these I suggest you grab one and stick it on every electric thing you can find. The telephone pickup coils are pretty cheap at MCM Electronics, or you can stop by Radioshack and grab one.

So, on to the sounds. I stuck this little monster on every electronic device I had in my immediate vicinity. The first recording is of my iPod. The pickup was stuck on the wheel/buttons as I scrolled through menus and skipped through a few songs. The interesting part about this recording is that under all the electronic sounds, you can hear the songs that are playing. I did not have headphones plugged in, so the pickup was grabbing the music straight from the harddrive.

IPod Transducer by Googe


The next recording is of my Nintendo DS starting up, loading a game (Final Fantasy IV), playing the game a bit, and saving. The pickup was placed right under the power switch.

DS Transducer by Googe


The third recording is of the laser on my optical mouse.

  Optical Mouse Transducer by Googe


This last recording is of me turning on and off my Markbass Little Mark Tube 800 bass amp. The first part is with the pickup attached to the top above the input and then moved back to the fan. The second sound is with the pickup on top over the fan. The third sound starts out over the fan and is then moved over the power supply, which is right next to the fan. The last part is over the power supply. I love the dissonance of the last part and the high pitched whine that comes after.

Markbass Little Mark Tube Transducer by Googe


  Recording Notes: Recorded with a telephone pickup coil into a Zoom H4n.