Tag Archives: microphones

Birthday Hydrophone and the Quest for the Shotgun Shell Grail

P1030472

My folks got me a Cold Gold hydrophone for my birthday last weekend and I’ve been having fun playing with it over the past few days.

In this example, the first two recordings are in my bathtub, the last are from a metal soup pot in my kitchen sink. I now know that there is a slow leak in the drain of my tub.
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Some recording shots

Some recording projects I’ve been messing with for PVK II and other projects.

icerecording1
To get some ice cracking and crunching sounds, I froze a bag of water to make a larger, pillow-shaped ice brick. It turned out to be less impressive of a crack than I was imagining but I was able to break it by hand and get some nice ice friction stuff out of it, at least.

oatmeal-recording

For PVK II, I needed to create some desert winds for the map Sandstorm. I already had some library recordings of wind that I liked but I needed some “sand” to add in, so I experimented with recording grainy items around the house including rice and oatmeal to try and get the right feel.

veggies-pre

Some veggies awaiting destruction in the name of flesh rips, stabs, and other gooshy gore noises.

bryn-fieldrecording2-crop

Here I am capturing some field recordings of the Key Largo shore. I usually record ambiences with the stereo mics from my Zoom H4 or H2. They also pick up a lot of background car traffic and distant boats and such so I thought I’d try track some wave crashes with a shotgun mic.

New toy: the H4 Handy Recorder

I’ve just gotten a new recording gadget, the Zoom H4 Handy Recorder from Samson. Although the menu layouts can be frustrating, this thing has remarkably good sound from the built-in microphones and even comes with lots of on-board effects. I tried to record some guitar and bass to test its 4-track recorder functions but I was having trouble getting any signal from the inputs. I guess I’ll probably have to read the dern manual.