AV News 174 - November 2008
The second recording is the whistle of the A4 Pacific locomotive “Sir Nigel
Gresley” as she approached Moorgates, near Goathland on the North York
Moors Railway.
I've never used it in a noisy environment. I've always tried to isolate the
sound I've wanted to record - to
eliminate, at source, the problem
of
picking
up
unwanted
background noise. I think of it as
the sound-engineer's equivalent
of a photographer controlling
depth of field! What I do know is
that the in-built microphones are
quite directional.
On one occasion when I was
recording a voice-over, a skip lorry reversed all the way down my road to the
farm at the end. The unit had been set up facing into the study and there was
no trace of the reversing alarm. On another occasion the next-door
neighbour's dog, a Boxer, barked at a passing dog. Again there was no
pickup of this external noise.
The techniques adopted for the recordings were as follows:
Bird-song - the unit was hand held with the microphone gain set at
Medium level. The birds were perched in a tree about ten feet in front of me
and about fifteen feet up the tree.
Train whistle - the unit was laid on the ground in between some clumps
of rushes with the gain set to Medium. It was a breezy day and I thought that
the rushes would offer some additional protection from wind noise (they did!).
The train was over half a mile away when the whistle was blown.
Voice-over - the unit was attached to my
tripod using the supplied cradle with the gain
control set to Medium. The microphones were
positioned about 12 inches forward of my face,
about 12 inches up and about 12 inches over
to the left with their axis pointing directly back
towards my mouth.
None of these recordings have been
subjected to any noise reduction, filtration, or
any other effct. All I have done is cleaned up my heavy breathing on the
Voice-over by replacing it with silence. I have applied very short fades in and
fades out at the end of the samples and adjusted the playback gains to
balance all the tracks to a similar sound level. All sound editing was done
using Audacity software.
I am still learning just what this little box of tricks can do. Every time I give
it a new challenge, it amazes me with the clarity of the final result. It’s enabled
me to solve all my sound-recording problems (that is of course, unless and
until Howard finds something wrong with the samples on the demo recording!)
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