The Recordist has released Autumn Rain.

A pristine collection of 50 24-Bit 96kHz rainfall sound effects from the forests and fields of North Idaho. Recorded primarily in the fall season of 2011 around my ranch and high up in the mountains. Other rain tracks were recorded early and late winter when the rainy season it peaking. A large portion of this library was recorded with the Sennheiser MKH-8040ST at XY-90 and XY-120 to capture the stunning detail of rain drops on leaves, wood and concrete.

BOOM has released Micro BOOM – Gun Handling.

Impressive and high quality gun shot sound effects are invaluable but they’re only half the battle. “Micro BOOM – GUN HANDLING” now gives you the perfect other half. 11 different firearms. Triggers, dry shots, safety switches, reloading, magazines and much more, delivered in the high BOOM Library quality standard with 96kHz, 24bit. A more than perfect addition to the BOOM GUNS Library. Click, click – BOOM!

Affordable Audio 4 Everyone released Lighthearted Magic. All proceeds above $5 go to Curesearch.org

A must have for anyone looking to add some interesting sounds for their visual FX. Don’t let the name fool you, there is plenty of good stuff to mix together to build up to darker sounding elements. The Lighthearted MiniMagic library was made for building that fun loving disappear sound, or for adding a great feel to some spining particles around a character.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Empty Sea has a sound library. They have one small release so far and there’s another one coming soon.

Coming soon, the full version of Sea Monsters.  This collection will showcase some of Empty Sea’s most original and best creatures.  Each sound will be recorded at 192k/24bit for optimum quality and maximum design potential

Frank Bry has released a new library called The Devil Dog.

Introducing Dixie, a very special English Bull Terrier with an amazing vocal ability that is unlike anything I have every heard. She is special because she is deaf and cannot hear what comes out of her mouth. She is loved and cared for by some friends here in town and they graciously allowed me to come to their home and record her. The Devil Dog HD Pro SFX Library contains over 800 individual Zombie-like sound effects recorded at 24-Bit 192kHz presented on 60 tracks.

Dixie makes the best noises when she is asleep dreaming or very tired and does not want to be bothered. She was very excited when I arrived so they tried to calm her down a little bit to see if she would make some of the amazing “alien” noises they say she makes. The sounds she made when I was in the room were great but after a while I went outside for 5 minutes and left the gear with them and they were able to get her to make some really cool noises. I was able to leave the recording gear overnight and got some really amazing close up sleeping sounds.

I used a Sennheiser MKH-416 and a MKH-8040 with the filter module set on a small stand. This combination is very good for this type of animal recording as the hyped-up top end of the MKH-416 works perfect for the normal pitched intense growls and barks while the MKH-8040 sounds amazing when pitched way down with a nice smooth top end and a monstrous low end. There are multiple distances for variety and dozens of variations on most tracks. Dixie can make sounds ranging from soft and subtle to over the top loud and vicious. She can purr like a kitten and snarl like an attack dog. I have never heard any animal make these kinds of noises especially a dog. Dixie got to know me after a few days and maybe next time I see here she will let me record her in her dream state.

The Devil Dog is available now at The Recordist. 60 files (over 800 sounds), 744.9MB, $50 us.

Hart FX has released Hart a Gator, a new library of alligator sound effects, cut from 10 hours of material recorded at 192kHz.

Alligators are quiet, stealthy creatures that roam the swamps and marshes of Florida like big, scaly, green ninjas. You see one silently skimming along, then all of a sudden it disappears! They hardly make any sound either – except for this one time of year… mating season.

During mating season, gators all of a sudden decide to emerge from their quiet ninja state and let the world know how much of a sexy beast they are – or at least they try to let the female gators know about it.

A gator bellow is when a gator fills it’s lungs with air, then lifts it’s tail and head up into the air, and then forces the air out in a way that causes the entire gator to vibrate violently. This creates this really awesome little dancing of water off the gator’s back, and creates a crazy growl that can be quite frightening. It definitely gave me a new respect for these oversized lizards…

This was not an easy library to record! The gator bellowing is infrequent, and it is often difficult to get close enough to get a clean recording. To add to that – if you approach too quickly and startle the gator, he will stop bellowing.

Hart a Gator is available for download at $95. More info: HartFX

Below is a q&a with Colin Hart, who shares some details about the process behind the library.

Can you tell us about the process of conceiving and planning this library?

I don’t really remember how the original idea came up (it was over a year ago…) but somehow we got the idea that it would be awesome to go out and record gator sounds. There is a gator “park” nearby where I live called “Gatorland”. They have upwards of 2000 gators and crocs there – I figured it would be a good place to start. So I called them up and got in touch with a guy that ended up touring us around to get gator sounds. The first time we went was in June – we were able to get some cool hisses and jaw snaps, which are territorial and warning sounds. Our contact told us that if we wanted some great sounds, it would be best to come back during mating season, when the gators bellow (as a mating call).

So come this year, around March, I called up Gatorland again and asked to come back in for a day of recording. I had no idea what to expect, so I just brought a bunch of gear and planned to stay a few hours. What I was able to get that day absolutely amazed me – these sounds were incredible! I had to get more. I was at the park for about 3 or 4 hours that day and only ended up with about 5 or 6 usable sounds, so I scheduled time to come back. I ended up going down there about 7 or 8 times total to get the sounds that I needed to build this library.

How were the recording locations and the specific situations with the animals? Did you have any preference regarding their movements and vocalizations?

The location made things a bit difficult. Because there are so many gators around, there are a lot of birds around. These birds don’t belong to the park – they are wild – but they come to the park because the gators add protection for nesting. No way a raccoon or bobcat is going to try to make it past all those gators to get to a bird’s nest. These birds were so pesky and loud! It made getting a clean sound very difficult. I basically had to be on top of a gator to get a decent sound.

The weird thing about recording the bellows was that the gators decide to bellow all at once. You’ll be sitting there with nothing to do for anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours, then one will start bellowing. Within a minute or two, all of the others start bellowing – one after another – as if they’re talking back and forth. Essentially, they are, telling the others how much more of a stud they are… In the main area, the bellowing probably only lasts 10 minutes, if you’re lucky.

So you stand around for up to 2 hours, waiting for the bellows, and all of a sudden it starts and you only have a few minutes to record. So you have to be ready. I would hang around taking pictures or something – maybe recording some ambiences – but my recorder was on and ready to go. I had to stay alert – as soon as you hear that first bellow, it’s off to the races! Then it was just a matter of figuring out which gator was about to bellow and get to them in time.

That was another thing – you could tell when a gator was about to bellow. They lift their head and tail up in the air and hold it there for a few seconds before they start. So when I saw one that was in a good recording location make that pose, I got over there as soon as possible – it is a very large area though, so sometimes that can be difficult – you always had to keep moving to try to anticipate what was going to happen next. The trick is that you can’t approach the gator too fast from the front – you will startle them and they’ll stop. Gators see movement and colors very well. David found that out the hard way when he wore bright colors one day and all of the gators were stopping once he approached them. Didn’t do that again!

How was your setup and methods for getting those sounds?

I had a recorder (generally a 702T) and a shotgun mic (a Sanken CS-3e or a Neumann KMR81i, depending on how I felt that day). I had the rig strapped to me and in standby for the whole time I was there, so that I could press record and go at a moment’s notice. Some days I brought little handheld recorders and my Joby tripod to mount them to the railing. I would just set them there, hit record, and leave them there for an hour or so. Those gave me my best ambiences, especially because the birds were slightly more active when nobody was near them.

The first two times I kept my headphones on, because I was concerned with the sound quality. Once I figured out how to best capture the sounds, I kept my phones around my neck, because I wasn’t able to locate where a sounds were coming from with them on, so my reaction time was slow – I was missing recording opportunities. David talks about this in one of his posts from a while ago on DS. I kept them nearby so I could reference if I needed to, but keeping them on my head wasn’t working so well. I experimented with using open back phones so I could hear through them, but they were still messing with my perception of direction.

I know one of the alligators ate a blimp that was covering the mic… How shocking was that? Do you have any sound of that moment?

That was a bit shocking – somewhat of an adrenaline moment… Both Johnny and I were recording when that happened, so we do have recordings of that – both from “First Mic” and “Third Mic” perspectives.

I have to say, I was kind of asking for it to happen because I was trying to provoke the gator into making hissing sounds by bopping it on the head with my boom pole – something that I picked up from the trainers. What I didn’t pick up from the trainers was that they were doing it with a stick, not a boom pole with $2000 on the end of it… Not my brightest moment, but it lead to some fun stories. The gator grabbed the “Dead Wombat” off of my blimp, along with one of the end caps. He also put enough weight on the pole to snap it in the center. Luckily I was able to wrestle it back from him (I did not actually wrestle him – just yanked on the boom pole a lot…), so I didn’t lose the mic or the blimp frame. K-Tek and Rode were both very nice and amused enough at my stories that they sent me replacement parts for free. Two awesome companies when it comes to customer service!

If I think about it enough, I can still feel the jarring sensation in my hands from when the gator bit the blimp – those things are strong!

Recordings of that moment:

You must be very busy recently, since there hasn’t been so much activity on Hart FX. I wonder if this library is the beginning of a new wave of releases or something. Any plans for what’s coming next?

I have been very busy! I’ve been doing a lot of SFX Editing on a handful of feature pictures over the past year, which has taken up a lot of my time. Also, a lot of custom sound effects libraries for specific projects. That has prevented me from having the time to release all that much on HartFX in the past year, but I am working on some stuff. I have 3 or 4 libraries that are all half done. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them released in the next few months :-)

Rabbit Ears Audio has released Hind Helicopter, a library of 77 files recorded at 24-Bit/96kHz.

One Soviet-era helicopter, four recordists, and plenty of fuel brings you REA_010 Hind. The Mi-24 Hind is a Soviet gunship that was introduced in 1969 and saw action in Afghanistan and throughout the Cold War. A few month back, I had the opportunity to record the Hind and assembled a team of of recordists to get ‘er done.

Sometimes when an opportunity presents itself, you just have to jump at it. This an animal of a helicopter that requires 26,000 lbs of thrust to get off the ground and pushes a ton of air. The helicopter’s large size and five blades give it a unique sound that is a combination of a “chirpy” whine and extreme low end.

Hind Helicopter is available at $129. More info: REA.

Below is a quick Q&A I had with Michael talking about this new release.

- What led you to create this library?

I was working at another gig and a friend of mine mentioned that he knew the owner of this particular helicopter and asked if I wanted to record it. At that point I didn’t know much about the Mi-24 and I started to do some research. Once I discovered how few of them were in the US and how little coverage there was, I jumped at the opportunity.

- What were the most interesting things of this helicopter regarding sound?

I can’t say that anything was boring. We learned very early on how powerful this machine was. It put out a tremendous amount of SPL and air-pressure. At various points throughout the shoot, each of the recordists were knocked down at least once from all the air that was being pushed. The blades are huge and the Hind has five of them, so it is truly a beast of a machine. I watched one recordist, Rob Byers, get flipped over twice during a take-off sequence because the Hind  passed a little too closely in his direction. We lost some good takes when we got a little too macho. During all of the pass-bys, I often found it hard to breathe from the amount of pressure hitting my body. Boy, was that fun!

We also spent half a day recording all of the doors, switches and electrical systems.  I really fell in love with that material during the editing process. Even the smallest switches have real weight to them.

- Could you tell us about the setup used and methods used for capturing those sounds?

For all of the pass-bys we wanted to capture a variety of perspectives and tonal elements so we went went out with a diverse collection of microphones. For all of the exteriors, we recorded with the following gear:

Exterior: Schoeps MK4, Sennheiser MKH 40, MKH 60, Sennheiser 8020, 8040, and 8050. Onboard: MKH 30/40. Interior Switches and Exterior Electrical Systems were recorded with a Schoeps MK4 + MK8 and a Sennheiser 8060. All tracked to Sound Devices 7-Series recorders.

The Schoeps really brought out the chirp of the helicopter where the Sennheiser 8000 series helped bring out the shear size and low end of the helicopter. Ultimately, the most important task at hand was recording as much coverage as we could with the fuel load we had. As you can imagine,  it is expensive to put the aircraft up, so you really have to maximize the potential for interesting recordings.

- How was the collaboration between the team of recordists?

I was happy to bring a crew of recordists that I knew very well and had worked with previously. All of the guys (Rob Byers, John Loranger, and Kelly Pieklo) have plenty of field experience.  Since I knew them well, spending a few days together was not going to be issue. We truly had a blast!  If one is going to do any sort of vehicle recording, having a group of recordists will help get the job done way more efficiently. We were able to spread ourselves across the airfield and cover the aircraft thoroughly.

U.S.O (Unidentified Sound Object) Project is defined as a continuing evolving organism of sound. Created by Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi, two sound artists working on several fields and exploring sound in many inspiring ways. Perhaps you already know about their fantastic blog, where they share lots of great things, making the site a must for anyone interested on sound experimentation, film sound design, electronic music, sound synthesis, signal processing, etc.

In the last year, Unidentified Sound Object started a new series of libraries aimed to sound designers and composers, starting with Hologram Room, a package of a wide variety of sources suitable for all kind of contexts and designed meticulously by the two sound sculptors. Today they’ve released their second package, which includes a fantastic collection of sounds created from electro-magnetic field captures.

Electromagnetic informations are invisible and omnipresent. In every city, especially the big ones, an infinite number of electromagnetic waves is hidden: we can’t hear them, but they’re everywhere! We explored this invisible noise pollution transducing electromagnetic fields into audio signals with a telephone pickup: it acts like a radio antenna for hum and weird electromagnetic noises.

We plugged it into a SONOSAX SX-R4 recorder, moving it close to electrical devices – like a stethoscope – to locate interesting and curious sounds, just like LCD television, internet antennas, lighting systems, transformers, game consoles, tablet, electronic security systems, scanners, computer monitors and hard-drives, printers, navigation systems, fax machines…

Available at U.S.O. $30, 40 files, 48kHz/24-Bit.

Below is an interview I did with Matteo and Federico, talking a bit about this new library and the ideas behind their project.

DS: Why you became interested on releasing a sound library about electro-magnetic sources?

M&F: For this Unseen Noises (USO002) we used telephone tap coils that receive electromagnetic signals around us and convert them into audible information to discover invisible and surprising aspects of the environment in which we live in. To widen our sound palette, we explored cell phones, tablets, light systems, automated teller machines, wireless communication systems, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, computers, navigation systems, wireless Internet routers, neon advertisings, public transportation networks. We just used the system of electromagnetic induction as way of amplifying musical sounds. Our efforts were focused on finding “articulated” behaviours and other musical qualities in them. Note that the files contained in “Unseen Noises” are real performances executed on different devices without editing. What you hear is a selection of several hours of recording: you’ll find those sounds in our musical productions such as InharmoniCity or installations like Empty Rooms.

DS: I wonder how’s your collaboration as a team and how is sound design and music linked in your work?

M&F: Our first meeting dates back to 2005 on the Cinema Audio Society forum. Despite the distance between our hometowns (Milan-Rome), from day one we’ve been very good friends and we never stopped producing ideas and material in various forms – under the common denominator of Unidentified Sound Object. This second sound library is a good example of multi-disciplinarity. Our experience in different domains – from post-production to composition – helped us creating musical material of various kinds. Sound editors and designers can choose whether to use the sounds contained in our collections as they are, or sculpt them further – being very rich in the frequency spectrum. It’s material which lends itself to be processed in the frequency domain in order to extract the masked harmonic components. Our work is all about detail, and our albums take a long time to make. Usually we extract from a raw material the aspects that will serve the compositional idea. In every collection there is a part of each one of us, a mixture of our different experiences.

DS: What about processing of the elements?

M&F: We processed the recordings a little, by means of decorrelation, to control only the source width and create a diffuse sound field. When decorrelating the source between two speakers, the impression is a psycho-acoustic spreading of the audio in the space between them to achieve a diffuse, broad sound image. A recording is replicated in a second channel and shifted with a variable offset (ms). Decorrelation of audio signals uses this micro-temporal delay to enrich the sonic complexity of the overall listening experience, creating timbrical colouration and combing due to constructive and destructive interference. These time intervals are indeed acting and influencing our perception of musical facts. As in “Hologram Room”, we took care of the loudness overall level: the problem we always found navigating through sound libraries of different origins, is the extreme difference in signal level between their content. Having examined the subject in loudness over the past two years, it is clear that it no longer makes sense to peak normalize the sound-files, but it is better to balance them towards a universal center of gravity. Personally I found the EBU R128 solution an efficient response. The experience of moving between sound effects and music without constantly adjusting the listening level is an approach on which we can not give up. The future is in the loudness control and the calibration of the monitor. The K-System by Bob Katz – who has the authorship of the system – is an effective solution: excellent readings are available on his website digido.com.

DS: Although you designed all the sounds included in the package Hologram Room (USO001), it doesn’t feel like a collection of designed sounds. I’d say is more like a package of layers or something like “designed raw elements”. If that’s correct… could you tell us how do you proceed on making these single elements, rather than “ready to use” sounds?

M&F: The sound sources can be extracted from field-recordings, everyday objects, acoustic instruments or materials generated through analog and/or digital synthesis.  This library is born instinctively, at first in an effort to create a private archive of custom designed sound effects to work, easily available for TV works. The effort to create an appropriate catalog, has generated similar groups for various applications. What we were looking for, was a family of recombinant sounds, to be easily layered and structured in any DAW. Thanks to Kyma and the custom tools in our possession, we’ve been able to sculpt our idea in an easily and familiar environment with instant feedback, before jumping in the Pro Tools timeline. We wondered: why not provide the material extracted from our musical encounters as “raw” material, but already organized, to suggest “emotions”? Fragments of sound materials – amorphous in terms of musical discourse – are defined by David Lynch and his composer Angelo Badalamenti as firewood. The director said that “continuing to work with sound, what you do not want to become is more and more evident.” In fact, the most perceptually original ideas we had, have always determined the nature of our compositions, with or without sound processes of transformation and transfiguration. Every phenomenon, deliberately taken out of its natural context, becomes something else and is no longer reconstitutable.

DS: What were your main tools and methods for fabricating sounds for these categories? Specifically talking about Kyma, could you tell us about the advantages you find for sound design related works? I wonder if you have any thoughts regarding other “similar” alternatives, such as Max/MSP for example.

M&F: Max/MSP and Kyma are not really similar. Kyma shares more similarities with SuperCollider. The advantages are in terms of operating procedures and efficiency of programming in an object oriented environment. All the control domain functions are written in Capytalk (a real-time implementation of Smalltalk). So the fact that you can “code” functions instead of patching them is quicker and more elegant (in terms of debugging). Kyma offers a true DSP object oriented work-flow that is focused on sound design. Max is more flexible when we talk about multimedia stuff, like installations, augmented reality or cross-domain applications. There is an issue about sound quality as well. Kyma has its own “sound-print”, which we like very much.

DS: How much improvisation is involved in the process?

M&F: Improvisation or sound exploration is fundamental. Sometimes you can achieve interesting and unexpected results only running trough unknown paths. It is time consuming – of course, but very often you find undiscovered territories only if you lose yourself inside them. Experience plays also a great role. It is not about what to do, but what to not do. It’s a negative approach; don’t do this or that, because you already know what it will sound like. It is a series of no, and no, an so on until you find what is left, which is very often quite challenging. Most appropriate for our work of art is the process of designing our tools and to study their “aural” behaviours based on what we would like to accomplish. Then the feedback approach comes into play. You do something and then you hear the output, very often predictable, then you inject some amount of “randomness” into it and things start to sound more exciting. A very stimulating approach is what we call “exploring the phase space”. When you define an instrument, that instrument can achieve specific discrete configuration states. We obtain this by using presets, and presets of presets. Then we move inside this discrete space adding just a little bit of randomness around each predefined states. So you explore in a non-linear way the behaviour of the system and its internal dynamics.

DS: How regularly are you thinking to release these libraries? What could we expect in these series?

M&F: Like every one of our free initiatives, there is no precise schedule for the release of future libraries; we would like to produce at least a couple of packages a year, derived from timbrical explorations of ongoing projects. We’ve quietly started working on a new collection: our job is to always deal with something new, to find sound objects for aesthetic consideration on their own terms. We’re just kind of scratching at the surface of that, we’ll see where it ends up. And in the pipeline there’s a new upcoming “untitled” album, to be released soon. In parallel, we recorded a considerable amount of material for a mobile interactive album that will be released very soon, a pure sensory experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Article written by Frank Bry about his new library Ultimate Destruction, a collection of+600 destruction sounds recorded over a five year period at 24-Bit 96kHz in a multitude of dirty, dusty, smelly, noisy, dangerous and physically grueling locations. Available at The Recordist]

The Idea

Where do I begin? This sound effects library has been in the making for over five years so I need to access my memory banks and see if I can remember some of the crazy sessions I did. But first, I want to share some of my thoughts on why I made this collection and the theory behind the madness.

Ever since I started in sound design I’ve always needed all kinds of crashes and general destruction source material. This kind of material is not easy to find and sometimes recording your own can be a challenge. There are some great CD library collections of destruction sounds but most of it is designed. While these work great for a simple “drop and play” audio situation when your in a time crunch and they sound wonderful when played by themselves, they often leave you to a situation that is just not quite right. What if you have a complex destruction scene in a film or need to create that incredible crash sequence in a video game? You need clean, high quality sound elements separated out that you can manipulate and process so it sounds like something you created, your signature sound. That is the idea behind Ultimate Destruction.

From My Mind To The Microphone

Some of the sessions for this collection were planned multi-microphone fiascos and others were just from being observant or being in the right place at the right time. When I was recording the crashes and other crazy stuff on my ranch I ran images and sequences through my mind of my favorite crash scenes from my favorite movies. I tried to remember what certain scenes sounded like and how the arrived at the final audio destination. One of the things I noticed in theses scenes is there are a lot of elements used to create them. How can I mentally break them down to the individual parts was my obsession during the recording process.

My goal was to record them as big as I could and as long as I could and this presented many challenges. The first was having the various objects needed to make the vibrations and second, the tools need to make the action happen. I’m always on the look out for stuff to smash. My garage is full of things like old TV monitors, computers, boxes of bricks, metal objects and other stupid stuff any sane person would dispose of. When I purchased my ranch it had a lot of junk laying around and I have kept it all and even found some things I never knew were there until recently. I have my tractor, long chains and cables and many farming tools to hit stuff with. OK, a good start. Time to begin recording.

Got Concrete?

After recording Ultimate Concrete SFX I had tons of cement block and sidewalk debris left over. I wanted to record long dumps and pours with the tractor but the loader bucket always made a multi-pitched metal tome when things fall out. I needed to solve this problem as the concrete dumps sounded like they were coming out of a metal container. I experimented with many types of padding inside the bucket and finally found the right combination of a couple of old rugs clamped and taped inside the bucket. This was no easy task since the weight of the concrete would sometimes pull the rugs off and they would fall to the ground with the debris. This did not effect the sound that much but is was a pain in my backside to put the whole dampening system back in place after each dump. It was enough I had to hand load the bucket each time so this was an extra step I wanted to do without.

The concrete still made some noise as it was falling out of the bucket so I carefully positioned the microphones so that sound was off axis and I tried to dump from as high a location as possible. I have a dirt ramp I built to drive the tractor up on and was able to dump the debris onto a concrete floor I found buried in a hillside that was from an old barn the burned down many years ago.

Cool! I Found a BIG Rusty Old Tool Box!

Just recently I found a old construction tool box that fits into the back of a pick up truck on a remote corner of my ranch. I pulled it out and dragged it to my foley pit and planned my next sessions with this lucky find. My goal in recording this metal box was to create source material that could be used for a variety of crash situations. From a car rolling down a hill to a large bus hanging off the edge of a cliff and falling over.

This tool box was full of old nails, tools, chains and other disgusting things so when it was moved it made all kinds of noises not just a hollow metal sound. Stuff was rattling around inside the box and I knew it would eventually all fall out so I only had a few takes to get that sound. The first thing I recorded was the rolling and tumbling down a hill. This did not go as planned at first because the box would not roll! It would just fall to the ground and stop even on a steep embankment. This was actually a good thing because I was able to kick it down the hill one or two revolutions at a time. I was able to digitally edit the take together for a full roll and still have the separate parts that can be timed to a sequence.

The next thing I recorded was pulling the box with a cable attached to my tractor. I had 75 feet of cable so the tractor was far enough away from the microphones that the engine sound is not there. I proceeded to yank the box up and down a steep dirt embankment and got some great stuff. Slowly the box began to empty itself and was now becoming lighter in weight that I was able to easily pull the box with a short cable against the dirt. I later added some metal pieces and then some glass windows for added effect.

No, You’re Not Tearing That Building Down, Are You?

When one of the auto dealerships moved out of their downtown location, the new owners scheduled the buildings for demolition. I kept an eye on the location as I drove by it on my trips to town. I finally noticed the big excavators and cranes in the parking lot next to the buildings. Soon they would be ripping the buildings apart, and I wanted to be there. I missed the first part of the tear down, but I eventually showed up and recorded the machine operators pulling some of the walls apart and separating the metal into piles. Wanting to be mobile, I used my MKH-8040ST rig on a boom pole. I was there at the right time. They had already pulled the roof off and the machines were inside the building behind the walls they were about to rip down. I was able to get up close (maybe too close for comfort) to the wall as they tore it apart and it fell over. I struck gold! I was so nervous and excited that I barely shot any video. The video I got was with my iPhone while I was holding the boom and positioned to flee if debris headed in my direction. This was a little dangerous I guess, but in the end, it all came out great. Thankfully I did not breathe any toxic dust.

The excavator operator came over to chat with me during the metal separation. He was more than happy to “perform” some cool metal mangling for me. Metal can make such unexpected sounds and this metal certainly did. As he shoved it around and slammed the excavator bucket into the pile, I recorded all sorts of nice big wrenching and squeaking sounds. Gold!

On another occasion, a house right up the road from my ranch was being destroyed, and I was able to get the final stages of that tear down. I recorded some wood crunches and cracks along with some metal roofing being rolled up for recycling. This was the same house where I recorded glass windows being broken for Ultimate Glass SFX.

Wood and Glass Make A Great Couple

I recorded some hard breaks, cracks and dumps using some old, slightly rotted lumber that I had laying around. After whacking them with a sledgehammer and breaking them to bits, I loaded them into the tractor bucket using the same dampening technique used with the concrete. I dropped them onto the ground and also onto the concrete floor. I had some alternate microphone recordings from Ultimate Wood SFX of plywood rips in my archive that I included in this collection.

Glass is a very difficult thing to record. It’s dangerous, loud, and messy. My goal this time, using all the left over debris from recording Ultimate Glass SFX, was to get some long glass debris sprays and dumps. After hand loading the glass into the tractor bucket (I always wear hand, eye, and hearing protection when working with glass), I was able to slowly pour the glass out. I had previously separated the large mirrors and thinner glass so each pour had a distinct size to it. Mirror glass is thicker and heavier while window glass tends to be much thinner. I tried short and long pours, but at times it did whatever the hell it wanted to do and it all fell out.

I had saved some broken window frames and was able to crunch and crack them in a stack using a MKH-8040 to record them. I also had some computer and TV debris set aside that contained glass pieces along with the plastic and metal portions. These made for some great debris movements that can be used to sweeten a crash scene. Some of the sounds are subtle, but they are still destruction.

Metal Madness . . . The Recycler!

I took a quick trip to the local metal recycling facility to ask them if they would allow me to record. They were super nice and loaned me a hard hat and said, “stay out of trouble.” The only interesting activity they had going on was some scrap aluminum bundling. This giant machine is belt fed with scraps of metal. After tumbling down the chute into the compactor, the scraps come out bundled in a fairly large size rectangular hunk of metal.

I was able to position the MKH-8040ST microphone just inside the top of the chute and get the pieces falling in and being mangled. The machine is powered by a large electric motor and hydraulics which produce a very loud whine and hum. Since the mic was just inside the chute, the motor noise was minimal. This machine was extremely loud when the metal was falling in. Since I had to wear a hard hat I could not wear headphones, only earplugs. Good thing I did not monitor the recording with headphones as I’m sure hearing damage would have occurred.

The sounds this machine made were awesome! Most of the time the belt would continuously feed hundreds of pieces of metal into the compactor so it sounded like one long, drawn out metal crash, perfect for sound design. The metal pieces were not that heavy so the resulting sound does not have much low frequency information, but when a larger aluminum chunk hit the side of the chute, it was great.

KABOOM!

I’ve always wanted to record explosions and while I was recording a few guns last year I had my chance to record some Tannerite. Explosions are not something you can record everyday. It takes some planning, a good location that allows this kind of very loud noise, and a very good rifle shot. Since I have the gear, all I needed was the above. It all came together after months of planning with the local gun shop. After recording multiple guns, it was time to set off the Tannerite. If you don’t know about Tannerite, it is two (legal) substances that when mixed together and hit with just the right projectile at just the right velocity, it goes BANG!

We brought along 25 half-pound canisters and planned how many we were going to tape together and set off. We started out with a few singles and doubles and then moved on to the big ones—up to five taped together. We set the canisters on tree stumps so they would not kick up too much dirt and debris. I recorded with all the microphones I had on the gun shoot placed at various locations in the gravel pit. I used a Sanken CSS-5, AT 835ST, MKH-416, PCM-D50 (96k), MKH-8040 and my MKH-8040ST microphone set at 24-bit 192kHz and 96kHz. I aimed the microphones in different directions and set them at different distances. I would guess the mics were anywhere from 30 meters to 50 meters away from the blasts.

I did not know what to expect. I knew they were going to be loud, but since we had just shot off some REALLY loud rifles, my perspective was totally messed up. Needless to say, they were LOUD. Your body feels the concussion but if you’re wearing hearing protection (like I was), they sound muffled. After we set off the first few smaller blasts it started to rain. I quickly grabbed all the gear scattered around the gravel pit and set it under the hatch of my car. It seemed like the rain was not going to stop so we called it a day, and I tore down the gear. Then as quick as it came in, the rain stopped. Since we were running out of time, I quickly got the MKH-8040ST and Sanken CSS-5 set up, and we recorded the remaining explosions.

I thought I was going to regret not setting up all the gear after the rain delay. After I returned to the studio and listened to all the takes, I found the best recordings were the MKH-8040ST. These microphones at 192k sound amazing. They record the full spectrum of the blast and when pitched down, live up to the hype.

It’s A Wrap

I recorded a many more sounds for this library and would love to detail it all out but this article would become a short novel. Head on over to my website and look at the photos from many of the sessions. Some of the sounds date back to a time when I was not documenting the sessions as I do now.

There are no heavily processed sound effects here (except the explosions), just the real life destruction action as it happened. Many of the tracks were recorded with multiple extended frequency response microphones at close, medium, and distant perspectives. Each category was recorded separately to give you, the sound designer, the freedom to layer and process each type of sound individually for the most creative options. I hope you get much use out of this collection and hope it works well and inspires you. If you use it, feel free to let me know where and how. I would love to hear your end results and am honored if you were able to use it in your sound designs.

One of the things I’ve learned over the many years recording sound effects is to be very observant. I’m almost too observant (it drives my wife crazy sometimes). I can get easily distracted driving around town or just hanging out in a public place. I’m always listening and looking for things to record. I was fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time and get some unique, and maybe once in a lifetime, material. I thank my lucky stars I was not in the right place at the wrong time. As always, be safe and enjoy! -Frank

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If you already like the spectral tools on iZotope RX, you’ll love this new tool, called Iris.

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More info: iZotope | Pro Tools Expert

We don’t use to talk so much about plugin news, but this fantastic.

spanner is a powerful surround channel manager, panner, remapper and folddown plugin for AVID Pro Tools.

it is the result of years of personal frustration with the Pro Tools panner and bussing setup and solves many of the common complaints about the surround workflow in Pro Tools.

if you ever work in surround you’ll appreciate this plugin I’m sure, but if mixing-in-the-box is your thing you’re going to see this as a major step forward.

Read more: maggot software | music of sound

The guys at Tonsturm have released their sixth library, called Clocks.

With this sound pack you get a huge variety of ticking and chiming clock sound effects, recorded from various type of clocks: Old tower clockworks, wall clocks, cuckoo clocks, antique grandfather clocks and many more….

Avaliable at $69 (until 25.04.2012). Specs: 24 Bit 96 kHz / 142 Files / 6,42 GB

Below are some details Tilman and Emil shared with DS about the creating of this new release.

How did you start to record this library?

The first clock we actually recorded was the clockwork of our “Cologne Cathedral”, you have probably heard of it before: It is one of the biggest cathedrals in the world and a world heritage site. We got an exclusive guide to the tower clock, which is still the original mechanic unit and not an atomic clock. It was a big experience to be in areas of this huge cathedral where you usually are not allowed to go.

But unfortunately we realized that the city noise was much too loud. We did record it for about two hours or more but after checking the recordings in the studio we decided to not include it in the library. After this initial recording we knew we had to find a way to record more of these fascinating tower clocks in a more silent and controlled environment.

I wonder how your interpretation of time or the age of the clocks affected the way you approached the library. I guess those weren’t used just as “generators” of sonic material.

The perception of time has changed a lot over the centuries. And so the sound of clocks has changed too. The interesting question for us was, what will happen if we record a clock from a decade, where time had a very different meaning. Like the clock from 1600 AD for example. Not to forget these clocks have an interesting history, most times they were used in churches. Will this have a different impact when you create a scene in a movie which takes place today? What will be the consequence?

What was the setup you used for the clocks? any special preference regarding the size of the objects?

We used a lot of different microphone setups for this sound pack. A MKH 70, 30, 8050, Schoeps CCM41, CCM8 and a piezo microphone Schertler Dyn C stereo set. We decided to add the Shertler piezo mics as they are build to pick up classical instruments and have a very low self noise. We were interested in how the clocks would sound when recorded with a piezo mic directly from the surface, especially those tower clocks. Sometimes the sound of the piezo mics was so different from the other microphones, you could have thought that it is a different clock.

Could you tell us about those special gems you recorded? I know there are clocks that are about 400 years old?

We found someone who owns a lot of tower clocks, Mr. Harig, he is a real expert when it comes to clocks. He restored every single clock on his own. A work where you have to be very detailed and precise. He also owns a clock which is from around 1600 Anno Domini (which is short after the middle ages..). It is really astonishing to see something work that was crafted that long ago, hearing it is like doing a time travel!

What are your favorite sounds from the pack? Any special story about any of them?

Yes, there is one sound named “many clocks”. There you hear almost all tower clocks of Mr. Harig at once:-). All the tower clocks are ticking and working in one room. It is really like a concert. Mr. Harig told us, that he likes to sit in a chair and just listen to his clocks. In the evening he is going there, starting every clock, just sitting and listening. This is such a touching scene, at least for us, it could be in a movie.

You told me one special thing you did on the sounds, and is that you edited the files so they can be looped without needing to do fades. Do you see this as the way independent libraries could evolve? Actually thinking about the designer and giving those add-ons, those things that will change their workflow perhaps?

Yes, absolutely! I think we all already do this while recording. The way we record them is the way we need them in editing for film. But often this can be taken further, no doubt. One problem is that everyone is editing a little bit different. But the way we did it with the clocks is something I missed a lot. When looping a clock you always have to be patient that the loop is correct, that the rhythm is correct when looped. Its really much more convenient if this is done in first place, so you don´t have to worry about this anymore. And no fades, just apple-d, its really nice to add clocks this way to a project:-). So, if you, the reader, have any idea how you would like to have sounds prepared, just write us! its important to get inspirations!

Thanks a lot for your questions Miguel!

TONSTURM

BOOM Library has released Dogs, a new library of dog sounds recorded at 192kHz/24-Bit.

This 2 DVD collection offers more than 7 GB of data. Recorded with high frequency response microphones going up to 50 kHz, these source recordings are not only an extensive high quality animal library but also the ideal source for heavy pitching, designing and effect processing. You can use this library as a standalone product or as the perfect addition to the “Creatures – Construction Kit” and “Wildcats – Tigers & Lions”.