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Re: Is my equipment outdated?

Subject: Re: Is my equipment outdated?
From: "Eric Fassbender" eric.fassbender
Date: Fri Feb 15, 2013 4:10 pm ((PST))
I agree with John. Plane noise is pretty intrusive and you are likely to hear 
it even when you are using shotgun mics. And then again, if you want to achieve 
a stereo effect, two shotgun mics might not give you the sound you are looking 
for as they don't give you the ambient sounds that omni mics will give you. A 
solution that might give you what you are after could be to use your NT4 for 
the stereo effect and ambient soundscape and then use a third shotgun mic to 
give you the control to record specific sounds that come up (e.g. a bird that 
you want to focus in on). You'll then have three tracks which you can mix 
together and layer later in the sound editor of your choice. For this you would 
of course need a recorder that can record three tracks.

In regards to unwanted sounds (i.e. noise) there is not much you can do, other 
than a) TRY to time it so that you get as few interruptions as possible b) come 
back on another day at a different time c) be patient. I find that the best 
times are early morning when people are still asleep, lunch time when everyone 
is eating somewhere (I make myself a sandwich that I take out on location so my 
tummy is not grumbling and I don't have to drive/go anywhere to buy lunch) and 
late at night after people have stopped watching tele and have gone to bed. 
However, depending on what you want to record you might not have the choice so 
in that case you only have options b and c.

One last comment on the plane noise. A few years ago I was doing a recording of 
some bell birds in the blue mountains and the environment was absolutely 
pristine. It was almost eerily quiet (and to be honest I was actually a bit 
scared at night in my tent because it was so dead quiet), so I got an extremely 
clean recording of the bell birds - except for the airplane that came in at 
about 17 minutes into the recording. Because I just left the recorder in place 
and walked away (to allow the bell minors to re-enter the space) I didn't 
listen to the sound while it was recording and I was pre-occupied with other 
things so I didn't notice the aircraft. Then when I got home I was devastated 
to find that that bl*&$y aircraft had ruined my recording. I was totally 
disappointed and let the file sit on my server for a couple of years because I 
didn't know what to do with it. Then about 3 years ago I upgraded my software 
to Adobe Soundbooth and discovered spectrograms (I had been using an old 
version of Wavelab before which did not feature spectrograms). Out of curiosity 
I pulled out the old bell minor recording and saw on the spectrogram that the 
plane noise was only audible up to about 1.5 KHz (it was pretty dominant 
i.e.loud in that frequency range, though). The sounds of the bell minors on the 
other hand only started at about 1.5 KHz and went up to about 4-6KHz (all this 
is from my fading memory so the frequencies might not be 100% correct). This 
knowledge then gave me the chance to cut out all frequencies below 1.5 KHz 
which then gave me a perfectly clean recording of the bell minors. This only 
worked because the recording location was so quiet in the first place as 
otherwise it would've probably sounded unnatural because I would've cut out the 
low frequencies from other surrounding sounds (bugs, wind in the trees etc.). 
But yeah, what I'm saying is, take a look at the spectrogram and check the 
frequency range of the noise and then see whether you can reduce the plane 
noise. I also find that nature sounds are very forgiving when it comes to 
editing. Often you can easily cut out a section and crossfade the two parts 
before and after the cut without it being audible. This might not be the purist 
approach but if I didn't do that I'd be completely depressed because I wouldn't 
be able to get many clean recordings. It is very rare that everything works 
100%, there are no interrupting noises and you get the soundlevels 100% right. 
You get the occasional recording where you don't have to do anything to it 
(this is when I fall into an almost meditative state which is the reason why I 
am out there) but the standard is that you'll have to do some form of 
post-production editing.

Hope this helps,

Eric



On 16/02/2013, at 7:31 AM, John Campbell <> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 7:04 AM, sounds.images >wrote:
> 
> > **
> >
> >
> > the NT4 will work, however what would be better would be 2 shotgun mics
> > (ie: 2 Rode NTG2 $299 each) so I can have : a) a bit more control over
> > keeping out unwanted sounds like planes flying overhead.
> >
> 
> It is very unlikely that microphone selection is going to be of much help
> in dealing with such unwanted sounds.
> 
> John
> 
> 
> 










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