Introduction
Hello everyone! I stumbled across the sound designer Barney Oram's blog, which documents his experience and methodology for 100 hours of audio recording and sound design. I found it very helpful and insightful, therefore I have decided to take on the challenge myself and spend 100 hours recording / designing sounds that I have little to none experience in capturing.
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I hope some of you find my experiences insightful but equally if you think I could have done something better, please leave a comment and let me know.
I will hopefully post my first entry in a weeks time. See you then.
Week 1 (0 - 1hours)
Hello and welcome to my first blog post, which focuses on documenting my experience and methodology of recording grasshoppers in a park.
Grasshoppers
I've recently taken up running. One evening, after running an embarrassingly short distance in my local park, I took a walking interval to prevent myself from collapsing. During this walk I noticed a dense chorus of insect sounds coming from some sheltered long grass. After closer inspection, I discovered that it was the sound of thousands of grasshoppers stridulating (frequently rubbing hind legs on to the for-wing). I thought this was a great sound to capture, however the location was less than ideal for recording because it is adjacent to multiple back gardens. As it is currently summertime, these back gardens are frequently populated by extremely hyper children, BBQ parties and particularly vocal dogs. Not to mention the popular flight path above and the train tracks behind. Nevertheless, I wanted record this sound so returned to the location at noon on the following day. I chose this time to lower the chance for human interference as the children would be at school and most adults would be at work.
Equipment Choice
To record the grasshoppers I brought my trusty Zoom H6 with the XY microphone configuration and shock mount and grip handle. As I have fairly twitchy hands, the shock mount is absolutely essential to avoid a lifetime of editing handling noises in the mastering process! The 90 degrees XY microphone configuration offered a wide enough stereo field for the size of the long grass area whilst eliminating the chance of unwanted phasing.
Microphone Position
The XY pair was position a meter away and facing the grasshopper infested long-grass, whilst keeping a central position to keep a balanced stereo image of the talent. Although, this approach would of been the most balanced, it did not produce the best results due to the interference of distant traffic, more prominent on the right channel.
Therefore, I decided to roam around with the recorder, monitoring for interesting and clear perspectives. This approach ultimately resulted in a close recording of the grasshoppers, which wasn't my first intention, however I felt that it was the best that I could get, working with the uncontrollable surrounding environment.