I haven’t been in Halifax for leisure a long time. The boardwalk seems to have been finished for now, no more cordoned-off parts, everything is there. There are even a handful of new art installations.
Now I am not an artsy guy to begin with, it takes a lot of effort to get me excited about anything art.
The title sounds like the one for the Opera, but this was way more relaxing. So I went to the beach, big deal. When I arrived there, hands in my pockets, I was surprised by the acoustics of the area.
So I went back to the car and picked up my gear.
Often, we encounter a soundscape that just begs to be recorded. Big surf after a distant storm is one of those. With our ears, this sounds so amazing that we can even ignore the wind gusts and enjoy the fresh air and waves crashing on the rocks.
In movies, we hear waves that are clear and distinct, crashing on rocks or on a sandy beach. But do we really hear that in nature?
Last time I wrote about the early morning ambience at The Ovens Nature Park. The sound was just amazing and at 5 in the morning, there was not a soul around to ask me loudly what I was doing.
That kind of interruption is all too common, so the earlier in the morning, the more successful the recording can be.
When you are in a nice place, you often hear sounds you want to record. Only to find that you have just a cellphone with you. Those recordings usually don’t cut it. The Ovens near LaHave in Nova Scotia is such a place.
Except that I did come prepared with a Zoom H3 and my two Behringer C-2s.
A few nights ago, I woke up to some lightning. As is my habit from years ago (read: ages ago), I counted the seconds until the thunder. At first, there was none. Then some 50 seconds, not enough to get up from my warm bed.
Then the gap shortened to some 12 seconds and I got up to close all windows in the house.
We all know that photography can select or eliminate elements from a picture. The saying goes that if it’s not in the frame, it doesn’t exist. In all my years of photography that has been true. Even if it was inevitably in the frame, there were ways to get still rid of something in post-processing.
For sound recording, that is quite different. We may have microphones that are predominantly sensitive in one single direction like shotgun mics, but they don’t eliminate everything else.
When you are hauling around both photo gear and audio gear, things can go wrong pretty quickly. One of those moments comes when you have your camera on a tripod and want to record sound at the same time.
The Zoom H6 might be called “Handy” but it is anything but if you want to use it in the field and you have no place to put it. I am, for example, not willing to put it straight on the beach or in wet grass.
Here in Liverpool, we have old train tracks. The tracks were pulled long ago and the trail is open to the public for walking, hiking etc. At least there is no traffic allowed.
A few weeks ago, I acquired a Zoom F3, while a lot longer ago I got some Lavalier mics I wanted to try out.
Sometimes it is “necessary” to update the content of the toolbox. I have had plenty of times where my trusty Zoom H6 declared surrender when recording high dynamic sound. Either I got the raindrops right and the thunder was blown out, or I didn’t get the raindrops and a perfect thunderclap.
Recording in multiple formats at once is a solution, but one that bugs me.
Well, probably. I walked across some roads here in Liverpool and was harassed by some very loud animals. At first, I heard them from far away; I thought they were some weird sounding birds. Yet I could see no birds and the sound was very loud.
I decided to record that as best as I could, with a fairly busy road close by.
When we arrived in the Dominican Republic, it was close to midnight. No way to see anything but the inside of the hotel room. The next morning, I got up quite groggy from the short night and went on to the balcony.
There I was hit with a sound ambience that I decided to record immediately.