The Anti-Antisocial Field Recording Method

We are proud to host and share this brilliant piece of work by Guido Helbling, Avosound – July 20, 2017.

NO AUDIO LINKS AVAILABLE, look here for the original source. 

I’m thinking about many pounds of extra baggage and the headache it creates when travelling.

I’m thinking of a hellish ride on the back of a motorbike through a typhoon in Vietnam; the time I spent on a kayak in high winds and treacherous waters, asking myself whether I should worry more about the equipment or the data on the recorder.

Luckily, neither adventure trip ended in disaster. But there many times when nothing interesting happened and hours of recording time were wasted. While tourists can just move on to the next sight, a sound recordist knows no such convenience.

Plus, there’s this:

…how long you had to wait for the perfect recording

…how many mosquito bites it took to get there

…how cold you were

…how you cried as your equipment was swept away

…how close you came to being eaten by a crocodile

…how much sh*t you had to endure to make your recordings.

At the end of the day, nobody cares if you made the recording behind your house or if you traveled far and wide to get it. The only thing people care about is the quality of the recording. But often you can’t just dangle a microphone out of your window to get an amazing sound effect. You have to travel to where the action is — which means you will encounter exotic people, wild nature and capricious weather (surprise!). Needless to say, all three together can be quite a headache…

Don’t get me wrong: I like the stories behind the recordings. Which is why you should [ add your own story ] or send it to me via email. The sound editor, however, has little use for such stories — he/she only cares about finding matching sound files.

Still, field recording is the best job in the world. But it’s definitely not a holiday!

• You are not alone on the planet.
• Everything you can hear while you’re recording will also be captured on the actual recording.
• Microphones belong on stands.
• No wind basket, no fun! Wind is your enemy — unless your purpose is to record it.
• The weather is whimsical and cannot be controlled.
• Forget about recording anything in the vicinity of an international airport, except if you want to record air traffic noise.
• The quieter the surroundings, the more audible the interferences (e.g. passing cars, airplanes, chain saws), even if they are quite distant.
• You are not alone on the planet.
• Famous places = many people = you are not alone on the planet
• Don’t expect pedestrians to understand what you’re doing.
• Don’t expect people to keep quiet
• Being quiet does not only mean not talking, it also means not moving (because noisy clothing is clearly audible on recordings, see below)
• Two people create exponentially more noise than a single person
• Birds chirp all day during summer
• Crickets and bugs come alive in summer
• Crickets make noise all night
• Blood-sucking insects will be drawn to you while you’re trying to remain motionless during a recording.
• There is no silent way to kill a mosquito.
• Watch out for local customs (example: from April until October, cows in Switzerland will make so much noise with their bells that it is impossible to record anything other than, well, cow bells).
• If a desirable destination can be reached easily, you won’t be the only one visiting it. In fact, you’ll probably be surrounded by people…because you are not alone on the planet.
• Sundays and holidays are generally quieter than work days. However, more people will be out and about on those days.

You can’t always go to places where no one else is around. But if you learn how to identify possible noise issues by researching the recording location, you will increase your chances of making a successful recording.

For example, if you intend to record the landing of a new Super Airbus plane, you should not be surprised if there’s a crowd of thousands already at the location. But if you wait for a few days and go to the location when the plane is flying according to the scheduled flight plan, you will find that no one is interested in it anymore and you’ll probably be able to make a pretty good recording.

“Do you work in television?” – Sound Category: Data trash, Source: unprocessed location sound archive, Avosound

You press record and after a while you press stop, thinking that you just made a great recording. But when you play it back much later, you realise that the recording contains all sorts of extraneous noise.

Whether or not a recording captures the essence of the moment can often hinge on the acoustics of the location, much like how the allure of unique properties in Georgia can hinge on their serene settings. As a sound technician, one must be acutely aware of the surrounding environment—it’s not solely about the subject of the recording. Noise factors, from the gentle chirp of birds to the subtle whisper of water, can intrude on the clarity of the audio. Sometimes, all it takes is repositioning the microphone a few yards away from an intrusive noise to attain that crisp sound, reminiscent of finding a quiet haven among the bustling backdrop of the Peach State.

Although I absolutely hate headphones, I often check the recording channels to make sure that I’m not capturing any unwanted noises. For more information about headphones, please see below.

…is a key factor that determines the success of a recording.

For a successful sound recording, you need to identify possible noise sources and find locations with good signal-to-noise ratios.

These requirements are much more important than using the most expensive equipment and ultra-sensitive microphones. It is, after all, very easy to make a bad recording with a good microphone. But when you identify and eliminate all possible interference sources, you can make great recordings even with cheap equipment. The list of possible noise interference is endless, but it mainly includes two categories:

• Obvious trash
• Trash that went unnoticed during recording

• your keychain is audibly jingling in the background
• your leather shoes are creaking
• your expensive new outdoor jacket makes a rustling noise every time you move

but also

• that mics pick up wireless signals and vibrating cell phones (yes, the construction of the Neumann KM184 is only ‘pseudo-symmetrical’!)
• and that you still made a lot of noise when you quietly rummaged through your pockets for the phone
• and that insects were mating on your wind basket, creating a humming noise that, once amplified, sounds like a landing helicopter

The recording below illustrates what happens when you’re too lazy to use your headphones. Personally, I do not advocate the use of headphones. But ever since I managed to ruin a recording because of a noisy wind basket, I have occasionally been using headphones again.

The assumption that cutting-edge technology and modern tools can get rid of any and all sound problems is simply false. Such thinking is misguided and should be changed immediately.

The reason is simple: restoration tools (just like the name implies) are mainly meant to restore things. They won’t improve a recording — they will just make it slightly less awful.

Instead of trying to salvage a ruined recording, you should try to minimise possible sound issues before the actual recording session.

The ability and willingness to make compromises is one of the basic characteristics of Swiss people. We are good at compromising, even when it comes to sound recording on location.

In many ways, a location is comparable to an apartment: there’s always something wrong with it, no matter how you look at it. If the rent and the location are great, your neighbours are probably idiots. And if your neighbours and the flat are great, the location is most likely rubbish.

Sound recording locations are similar. You need to assess how bad the interference factors are.

If there are too many factors to consider, it is probably better to abandon the location and look for a better place. This is, however, not as easy as it sounds (I myself have been guilty of ignoring this advice on many occasions).

Experience teaches us that these kinds of recordings take up an ungodly amount of time. Trying to get a clean recording is extremely time-consuming (and often impossible). More importantly, you are wasting storage space on the recorder (as well as on the intermediate storage system, the backups and even the long-term data storage drives). Dead data is a massive space waster.

If you have a recording of cars/street traffic with the sound of crickets in the background, you will not be able to use it for a winter scene. However, you might be able to compromise and use it for a summer sequence instead.

If you wish to record trains or street cars, you can sit yourself onto the railroad embankment (try not to look like a suicide candidate, or the driver will pull the emergency break).

It is more difficult to record the arrival or departure of a train without catching PA announcements or the sound of waiting passengers. The question is, do you really need an absolutely clean recording without any people in the background? Whether you are recording a train, an airplane or a restaurant ambiance, it is important that none of the background conversations are distinct enough to stick out of the general murmur of the crowd. As soon as an individual voice dominates the background, the ambient track essentially turns into a recorded dialogue, in which case the recording becomes unusable (the voice is too distracting).

My rule of thumb is as follows: as soon as there are more than three conversations overlapping in the background, you can record an ambiance track (individual conversations will no longer be distinct enough). Sound designer Walter Murch explains the ‘rule of three’ in his article ‘Dense Clarity’ (in the ‘Trees and Forests’ paragraph, which is required reading anyway — not just for sound people).