Wow! Long time no write!
Been very busy lately, with the company launch and all… so it’s been a while since I’ve posted any cool recordings or talked about my escapades. So, time to start writing a bit again. This post will just be an update of what I’ve been doing, some cool recordings I’ve done on the side, etc…
So, where to being?
For my birthday, back at the beginning of October, my parents flew me up to DC (where they were at a conference for a weekend) so I could celebrate with them. During the trip, I picked up a car from them and then took the Autotrain back to Florida. Now, that’s a 19 hour train ride. So I’d be silly not to bring a recorder with me! So I packed up my RØDE NT4 and a Sound Devices 702T and I was on my way.
Quick Tangent: DC was awesome. PERFECT weather, got to meet up with Steve and Karol Urban and Shaun Farley to have lunch, then got to tour Karol’s studio at Discovery. Fun trip! Also got to grab some room tone in different areas (hotel was nice and quiet, and my room tone library is lacking!)
So, onto the fun stuff. I was able to get three really unique recordings on the train. Two were ambiences, one was a hard effect. This first one I got was in the bathroom on the lower level of the train (it’s a 2-story train car). The bathrooms are similar to what you’d find in an airplane, just quite a bit roomier (big enough to change clothes in), and every surface was stainless steel. So I pulled out my mic, made a few adjustments, and waited for the train to steady a little. The following is a recording of the ambience in the bathroom while the train was travelling smoothly at about 30mph.
Very cool ambience IMO. Very “spaceshipy”.
Next, as you probably guessed, comes the vacuum toilet in the bathroom. Again, same room, same mic setup:
That sound reminds me a bit of the sound Ann Scibelli used for the Enterprise door sounds in Star Trek (See video here). I’ve always been intrigued by this sound. I don’t know if I think it’s disgusting or if its just awesome. Either way, I love it.
Next up is a recording I made later in the night. When you walk between cars on the train, you are in open air straddling the two cars for about 4 feet. It can get a bit bumpy out there, but nobody seems to have too much trouble transitioning between cars. I was sitting rather close to the door to the dining car, so there was a lot of traffic until around 12 or 1am, so I didn’t even try to get a recording before then. My plan was to get outside of the door and straddle the two cars for a few minutes, with both doors into the cars closed. I figured this would probably look a bit sketchy, so I waited until almost everybody was asleep (which didn’t take very long, since I was the youngest person on the train by 30 years…), and all the day time crew had retired to their quarters. Didn’t want to freak anyone out.
So I grabbed by gear, made sure everything was on and ready to go (didn’t want to be fiddling with gear while straddling two train cars…), and headed out. Closed the door behind me and figured out a stable way to support myself and started recording. Here is an excerpt of the recording:
So, those are my new updates for now. More to come soon (I have a few more recordings up my sleeve to share). You can probably expect most of this stuff to make an appearance in one of my libraries over at HartFX sometime in the near future as well.
Thanks for tuning in!
