New article from Develop Magazine, October’s Issue:

PUT TOGETHER Forza Motorsport 4 and racing car audio specialist Nick Wiswell, and arguably you have a marriage made in game audio heaven. UK game audio’s loss was US studio Turn 10’s gain as Wiswell and his family upped sticks, moving from Cheshire to Redmond just over one year ago.

With a wealth of experience garnered whilst working on global hits like Project Gotham Racing, he nevertheless faced some fresh career challenges. Previously heading an in-house team of sound designers and audio programmers, he was confronted with a fundamentally different modus operandi – a small core staff team ‘focused on the bigger picture’ scaling up with outsourcers and freelancers based on specific project needs and using audio middleware.

“The manifesto for audio was clear: to make the racing sound more exciting, improving the car audio to be more visceral,” explains Wiswell. “My predecessors had been looking at the potential for additional dynamic mixing and DSP which fell right into my wheel house; so I took that and ran with it. We didn’t want to over-amp things too much and break realism, but we were definitely looking for enhanced excitement.”

Download here.

Firelight Technologies has been uploading new tutorials created by sound designer Stephan Schutze. Topics include multri-track events, interactive music, platform settings, car recording and more.

More videos at FMOD TV.

Thanks to Wit for the link.

Electronic Arts has started a 4-part series dedicated to explore the sound of “Need for Speed: The Run”. The first episode features product manager Jeff Sharma and audio directors Charles Deenen and Rich Adrian.

HP and Need For Speed present a 4-part series covering all aspects of sound in the latest entry into the Need For Speed franchise: Need For Speed The Run. We will take a behind-the-scenes look at how the team captures everything from a super car engine to the sound effects of a tense action sequence to create one of the most well-respected soundscapes in gaming.

California City is one of those places with no apparent reason for being. It’s stuck out in the middle of the Mojave Desert where it’s brutally hot in the summer and windstorms will sandblast the paint off your car any time of the year. Fewer than 15,000 people live here, and if they didn’t have jobs at Hyundai’s nearby proving ground, a lot of them would leave. But California City has an airport. And since that airport is never, ever busy, it’s the perfect place for Peter Brown to record car sounds.

Click here to read the complete article.

I have the privilege of getting my first interview with the awesome, excellent, Watson Wu.

TTA: First off, some of your work with NFS ProStreet — this game emphasized more on the fun of the game than on the realism of driving, did this slightly different emphasis have any effect on the recording technique for the vehicles? Were there any cars that proved difficult to record well? Lastly, did you use predominately dyno-based recordings?

For ProStreet I was hired to field record passbys and help the EA team apply microphones on GT race cars in Sebring, Florida. We were capturing Corvette CR06, Cadillac, and Viper cars during their practice runs around the track, speeding at 170-190mph. The Corvette CR06s are The Loudest race cars I have ever encountered! They were like constant sustains of gun shots, painful to our ears. While many of the microphones were able to withstand the constant pounding of the high decibels, I was given from the team mic pads to cut off the extreme sounds going into my field recorder. While EA as well as a few of their external contractors sometimes use dyno-packs, I most of the time capture vehicles while in motion. Many of us believe that this recording on the go produces the more natural sound. As we have learned from years of recordings, we constantly strive to achieve better or nastier recordings with newer microphones and push the limiters to the extreme for that more aggressive sound. after all, video games and films are fiction based.

Continue reading here.

Home Digs

“Transformers” is a mega-hit franchise for Hasbro with a huge fan base fueled by cartoons that beckoned to us in our formative years during the 80’s. The battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons has raged on for decades now, with seemingly no end in sight, and we still line up to see it, be it new toy line, game, and movie releases.

When Activision handed down the “Transformers” mantle to us after “The Bourne Conspiracy” was released, we knew this was going to be quite a bit different than anything the studio had done before…and FUN. Finally I had the chance to work in the science fiction genre, something I’d always wanted to do.

In the very beginning, we weren’t sure what the story was going to be, but that didn’t stop us from jumping in and recording a new library’s worth of material in a few short weeks. Much of that was in anticipation of creating a whole new soundscape of material that didn’t exist much in our libraries with the prior game titles we had worked on. Fun times indeed!

As the vehicle technology behind the “Bourne” game’s Mini Cooper was being expanded and improved to make a vehicle mode viable for Transformers combat and transportation, I began editing all of the best vehicle source we had from the overused commercial libraries most sound people are familiar with out there. As anyone who’s done this knows, there isn’t much to work with. At least much that’s usable from a game standpoint. Still, I prided myself on getting all sorts of tractor trailer squeaks and hisses ready for Optimus Prime and muscle car engine audio ready for Bumblebee.

However, we soon learned that the story of the game wasn’t going to take place on Earth at all. Instead, the focus would be on the Transformers’ home world, Cybertron, as we jumped into the story of what happened before coming to Earth, an area not thoroughly-covered by Hasbro’s existing canon.

This was exciting news indeed.

With the robots no longer needing the ability to transform into human-designed vehicles for disguise purposes as they did on Earth, this opened up the sonic palette quite a bit to experiment with what it might sound like for these Cybertronian citizens to zip around in their own vehicle form, aligned with their own advanced civilization and technology.

Listen To My Bumblebee…

The first vehicle form I tackled was the class that was to represent Bumblebee in the game. It was multiple looping tracks, meticulously-crossfaded together at differing speeds, heavily processed with varying degrees of MondoMod, MetaFlanger and Enigma (three Waves plug-ins that I finally got to “dust off” after years of neglect). When I was sure I was done, I played it for some of the guys and the first thing Mike said was, “that’s cool, but it sounds more like a tank”.

A…tank? Here I was focusing on trying to get something zippy-sounding for a smaller sci-fi car and it ended up being this heavy-sounding vehicle instead.

Sure enough, that sound became the basis for the tank class and remains relatively untouched since that initial day. So funny how you can miss the mark sometimes!

Wu to the Rescue

Despite the fact that the Transformers’ vehicular modes were now going to be very different from their Earth-born disguises, including hovering being a key feature, we wanted to keep the vehicles’ sound grounded in reality, which meant we needed better source.

Even though we would have loved to seek out and record several vehicles on our own to gather this material, due to our condensed development cycle for the game, we decided to work with another industry professional that seemed to have quite a few connections in the vehicle arena – Watson Wu.

One of Watson’s specialties is recording cars, and once we contacted him, the man was out with a portable recorder auditioning several models for us right away to see what we think would work for each of the Cybertronian vehicle classes in the game. Optimus Prime no longer needed to be a tractor trailer, nor Bumblebee a Camaro or Volkswagen, so we chose the basis of these characters’ vehicle modes mainly on the character of some of these auditions that Watson was providing.

This 2005 Porsche Carrera GT was used for Bumblebee:

A 2003 Hummer H2 was used for Optimus Prime (owner John Corcoran pictured):

Many, if not all, of these other cars were featured as well, though the remaining details escape me as to which was used for which:

2005 ProCharger Corvette:

1969 Corvette Dragster Twin Turbo (owner Steve Keech pictured):

1965 Cobra Replica:

2007 GMC Sierra SLT Turbo Diesel (with owner Shawn Koss and Mr. Wu pictured as well) – used for Ratchet and other “truck”-class vehicles:

Digging In

After Watson recorded each of these vehicles with multiple onboard mics, along with pass-bys, revs, and a slew of other unique recordings capturing the vehicles’ personalities, he delivered the high-resolution recordings to us and I began incorporating these sounds into the design of the vehicles. Each vehicle type has their basis defined by these recorded performances, except for the tank and jet classes, which were designed with other source.

Every vehicle can boost and jump in the game, to give the player as much maneuverability as possible while in vehicle form. When you boost, the wheels come out and you drop down from a native hovering state, giving you greater speed, though with less steering ability, which is great for straight-aways and escapes.

In the end, each vehicle ended up with about 4 or 5 main loops for main engine, a boost loop mode for each, with boost-on and boost-off sounds, jumps, lands, with some careful ducking and DSP usage woven in.

There are many different electronic-sounding, modulated motor sounds blended with the car sounds to help give that sc-fi quality to them – including an electric razor resonating a stainless steel strainer idea that yielded a wonderful tone (and idea I stole from Ben Burtt, though he used a salad bowl). It was a lot of fun to experiment with things like this, and I achieved some really cool results.

I wanted the vehicles to feel like they were always accelerating, so even if you’re in the game and are traveling at your top speed, there is a pitch envelope that continues to raise the engine loops incrementally higher for around 30 seconds or so. Of course, you never really get to experience that much during gameplay as you are too busy shooting and evading, but its there. J

Conclusion

“Transformers: War For Cybertron” was a great game to work on, and though I ultimately left for Sony Online around the game’s alpha milestone, I look forward to the new releases from High Moon and their audio crew, which will be even better than what has come before. Rock on, guys:

Pictured left to right, top row then bottom row: Ian Mika, John Drelick, Mark Loperfido, Aaron Marks (visiting), Watson Wu (visiting), Robert Burns, Rodney Gates, and Christian Sakanai (missing: Mike Niederquell)

Credits

These gentlemen provided the vehicles that were recorded and used for the game – they drove, of course J:

Steve White

• 2005 Porsche Carrera GT (V10 – one of only 2 of these supercars)
• 1965 Cobra (Backdraft Roadster replica with Rouse engine)

Steve Keech

• 1969 Dragster Corvette (twin turbo, 1200hp, 9 liter (this car killed one of Watson’s lavalier mics during a burnout session)

John Corcoran

• 2005 ProCharger Corvette (supercharged sleeper)
• 2003 Hummer H2 (V8)

Shawn Koss

• 2007 GMC Sierra SLT (turbo diesel)

Disclaimer: I am writing these articles as an independent sound designer. Any views or opinions expressed here are simply my own, and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any company, corporate entity or anyone else. Any images or sounds presented are subject to copyright by their respective owners, and are presented for educational purposes only. Any information given is correct to the best of my knowledge. Void where prohibited. Your mileage may vary.

Action movies are pure sonic playgrounds. The busier the scene, and crazier the action, the more opportunities we have with sound to enhance the experience for the audience. But with that opportunity comes the responsibility to clarify the action, and focus the audience’s attention. We want to thrill the moviegoers, not pummel them with audio. As sound professionals, it’s our job to bring to the mix all the elements we think are needed. A great mixer then sorts through the dialog, music and all the sound effects to find the perfect balance from moment to moment. The ultimate authority, in the end, is the director.

Rob Cohen makes movies that are great for sound. His action sequences are visceral, and visually dynamic. He also knows exactly what he wants sound to do for his films. I’ve had the good fortune to work on four of his films, and each one has been a blast.

The Fast and the Furious

I began work on “The Fast and the Furious” in 2000, while I was still the “new guy” at SoundStorm. It was one of my first big movies. It also marked the first time I worked on a multichannel surround speaker system. Although I was exploring new audio territory on a huge project, I knew the soundtrack itself was in good hands.

Supervising Sound Editor Bruce Stambler knows cars. He assembled a top-notch team of recordists and started recording extensive car libraries of a huge number of exotic cars. Every featured vehicle was researched and a suitable sound-alike was found. Recording sessions continued on throughout the post production process. I was not present at the recording sessions myself, but I heard the results and they were phenomenal.

All the cars were cut by SoundStorm editors using the Fostex Foundation 2000 system. Imagine having only 8 tracks available at one time! The interface consisted of a small touch screen. You can see more pictures of the system in this French article here – it even mentions SoundStorm and my mentor/predecessor Lance Brown if you scroll down to “Sound Design”.

My tasks on the show were primarily traditional “sound design” moments, and a few specialty sounds: CGI point-of-view shots flying inside of an engine, all the hi-tech NOS activations and associated power surges, some slow motion scenes, fast car by sweeteners, and most importantly: the “sense of speed”. We also planned for a layer of animal sweeteners for the cars. The sound design workload was already heavy, so we brought in Charles Deenen to take over that enormous task. He delivered spectacular tracks that added a new level of ferocity to the already outrageously aggressive car recordings.

We split up the sound design for predubs like this:

DSN A = Animal swtnrs, day-night transitions (Charles’ stuff)
DSN B = Design FX (NOS, titles, whooshes, etc.)
DSN C = Car swtnrs (multi-channel pre-panned bys, tires, engines)
DSN D = Int car wind & “sense of speed” FX

Each character was represented by a different set of design material. The unique sounds highlighted the different cars from shot to shot, to help the audience keep track of the characters. It also supported and reflected each person’s character traits.

The NOS shots, like everything else in the movie, were larger-than-life events. The “inside the engine” shots were visually very dense. These all required very detailed work to convey such sonic complexity in a very short time. The best way I’ve found is to have little bits of sound follow each other in a sequence, instead of having too many sounds happening at one time. I think I spent about a week or so on the first 8 second trip through Dom’s engine. I used short pieces of evocative sounds: firey explosions, air blasts, spinning mechanical sounds. The cam shaft spins were created from an old slide projector sound effect. The “engine by” sound included a CU engine recording of my old dead Buick Skyhawk on the day it was picked up for spare parts. It looked just like this one:

“The sound of this car was used in FATF?? Oh the shame!!”

[I should note that I recorded another sound from this car that day… a sound that later became the Enterprise warp throttle down while the “parking brake” was on - but that’s another story.]

I kept going back to clarify the mix, and take advantage of the 5.1 speakers. For Temp 1, I delivered my design as a virtual mixdown. I was pleased to get a call during the final mix to send my original temp 1 mixdown to the stage, since they liked it so much. A year later I was pleasantly surprised to hear my entire “in the engine” sequence triggered from the DVD menu when the film is started.

The sense of speed was a fun challenge. During the high-octane race scenes I wanted to create the feeling of dangerous acceleration. In nearly all those scenes, there are tonal sounds that rise in pitch and intensity – either low end moans or high end turbine-type sounds. Another key aspect was a set of various wind sounds. Everything from high whistley winds (also slowly rising in pitch) to monstrous low end buffeting roars were used. I also created some subjective sounds to convey the adrenaline rush felt by the drivers.

Last but not least, are what I called “blur bys”. I made a variety of aggressive and fast whoosh bys that I cut for foreground objects whizzing by. I panned the blur-bys and other design elements and rendered them using a third party panning plug-in. This was 10 years ago! I was using version 5.0 of Pro Tools and surround panning had not yet been implemented at that time.

Brilliant, veteran mixer Dan Leahy mixed all the effects and design tracks. It was the first of many inspiring collaborations I’ve had with Dan. He brings incredible skill and enthusiasm to his projects in equal measure. At this point I want to stress again the team nature of the collaborative endeavor that is film sound. The sound crew for FATF included:

• Sound Design and Supervision: Bruce Stambler M.P.S.E., Jay Nierenberg M.P.S.E.
• Re-Recording Mixers: Michael Casper, Daniel J. Leahy
• Supervising ADR Editor: Becky Sullivan, M.P.S.E
• Sound Effects Editors: Steve Mann, M.P.S.E., Kim Secrist, Steven F. Nelson, Brian Best, Howard S.M. Neiman, Glenn Hoskinson
• Sound Design: Tim Walston, Charles Deenen
• Dialogue Editors: Mildred Iatrou Morgan, Robert Troy, Bill Dotson, Donald Warner, Jr., M.P.S.E., Cathy Speakman, Paul Curtis, John C. Stuver, M.P.S.E.
• ADR Editors: Nicholas Korda, Lee Lemont
• Supervising Foley Editor: Michael Dressel
• Foley Editors: Scott Curtis, Dan Yale
• Additional Effects Recording: Richard Yawn, M.P.S.E., Gary Blufer
• First Assistant Sound Editor: Paul Aulicino, M.P.S.E.
• Assistant ADR Editor: Marc Deschaine
• Assistant Sound Editors: Bradley Clouse, Bruce barris, Bill Cawley
• ADR Mixer: Jeff Gomillion
• Mixing Recordists: Charles Ajar, Jr., Andy Peach, Eric Justen
• Foley Mixers: Eric Thompson, C.A.S., Shawn Kennelly
• Foley Artists: Gregg Barbanell, Laura Macias, Sean Rowe

(Information taken from DVD credits)

Colin Hart has announced the release of “My Hart is Racing“, a new sound effects collection of drag racing cars.

This is my second library release. It might be small in size, but it’s epic in sound! 46 files in 96k/24b goodness. The are cars, bikes, Jr dragsters, all sorts of stuff in the library. I’ve got recordings from the beginning of the drag strip, from the end of the drag strip, in the middle of the drag strip, in the paddock. There’s all sorts of sounds! There’s even a grab bag file – nearly 7 minutes of an unedited qualifying heat!

All sounds were recorded with a Sanken CSS-5 into a Sound Devices 702T.

The My Hart is Racing library is just what it sounds like. You get 37 minutes of heart pumping, gas guzzling racing action. Some of these sounds just hit you in the chest!

The library is available now on Hart FX at $20.

John Broomhall has published another of his great articles on this month’s issue of Develop Magazine, this time talking with sound designer Mark Knight and audio director Stephen Root on the sound of F1 2010, a game developed by Codemasters.

Relatively few privileged sound designers ever get up close and personal with a Formula 1 racing car.

Even fewer get to satisfy their own particular quest for the holy grail of motorsport audio – a decent onboard F1 engine recording. Having worked on Geoff Crammonds’ Grand Prix sims back in the day, this month’s feature proved something of a nostalgia trip revealing that whilst the recording challenges I faced then haven’t eased, the technology to manipulate F1 audio in production and at run-time has blossomed beautifully.

“You can never have enough access but opportunities are few,” says Codemasters audio director Stephen Root. “The Force India team let us record their Mercedes engine and McLaren gearbox combination during shakedown testing at Silverstone before the 2010 season start.

“Later, Brawn GP – subsequently Mercedes GP – provided us another outing during testing in Jerez, Spain. Both were really helpful working with us the night before to position DPA lavs on the chassis before the car was put together – even building us custom suspension mounts to augment the bespoke cradles and windjammers we’d already created.”

Nothing, however, could have prepared Root and his team for the astonishing heat and vibration generated as the car flies around the track at up to 200mph. Most of the solid state recorders tried were shaken to bits, but surprisingly the relatively cheap and cheerful Zoom H4 got the job done. The team also recorded in test cells at Ferrari HQ in Maranello, Italy where engines on test beds are computer-operated within a controlled environment – although they found their otherwise flawless recordings were somewhat marred by inherent room reverberation, impossible to totally eradicate despite portable acoustic damping.

Download or View Online: Develop 111 – November 2010

Back in the day when I first started recording cars, we were using small DAT machines, the Sony TCD7 and back in those days DAT machines were very expensive, so we had maybe 2 DAT machines. We had to record sounds for this movie called The Chase, and it was all a car chase movie. So Greg and I set out to figure out how we could make big hollywood sounding cars and between the 2 of us we came up with the idea of mounting mics under the body of the car. and running the cables to the driver’s seat. We thought about what’s important on a car, what are the most important sounds we need, obviously it was the muffler and the rear tires. We found the loudest muffler spot, and then angled the mic toward the tires. We weren’t going for tire noise, so through trial and error we found the spots without tire sound and no wind. We found a place where the mic would not be hit by wind, this is called drafting, a spot under the belly where the path of the wind isn’t going to hit the mic.

Those were the factors we used to determine where to place our first mic. Another thing to consider is that if you’re doing any gravel or dirt, is that kicking up rocks and pebbles and debris into the mic can create endless hours of editing, so that could be a factor also.

As far as the engine goes, we had heard about the tachometer where you put a car and you mic the engine and you blast the engine. I don’t know if we heard the recordings or we just deduced that a car that’s not moving without substantial drag on the engine, would sound like an interior car that was idling with stationary revs. Another thought was, we don’t want to be inside the engine compartment because that would be going in the direction of the tachometer but we wanted to have the feeling of movement so we decided to look under the belly of the car, get as close to the engine as possible, listen to the sweet spot where the engine really roars, stay away from the tire sounds because we didn’t want the tire whine, and then find the right spot for the mic.

We had this simple 2 mic technique that we then brought to the recorders in the interior, and that’s how we started with our onboard recording techniques. The second mic was in the interior, because you always cut to the interior (we had a Neumann in the interior).

For mics we were looking for thin small ones that could handle a lot of SPL (Sound Pressure Level) and that we could hide for drafting purposes. We settled on small Crown PZM mics. These mics can handle a lot of impact, they’re great for keeping out of the wind, the downside is that they don’t cover a broad spectrum of sound.

Years passed by and now I have the DEVA-5 8 channel onboard recording. What the DEVA allows you to do is that you can focus your main mics on the main spots (engine, muffler, interior) but then it gives you a couple of other mics to play with. For example, if you’re not sure how a mic is going to sound, or you want to test this mic, the DEVA is great for that because you can put 8 mics on the car, if you lose one mic or two it’s not the end of the world. So its changed the approach to recording cars. The fundamental for main mics is still the same, but now you have a little room to play with other mics and try other things. You can also pick up locations in a car that don’t often make noise, for example, you can have one mic focus on tire noise, so when you get a squeal or tear or some sort of big tire sound, you use that mic for that tire sound.

There are parts in the engine compartment that are more relevant or useful, with the 8 channels you can now focus on them. So you want to hit your air intake, listen to the engine and hit it, rev it, see where the air sucking is. This is a very important part to record, I learned this from Richard Yawn and Bruce Stambler, through their recordings of “Three Kings” and “Fast and the Furious”. At some point the air intake is going to kick in and you’re going to have a big suck sound and you want to have that for when they cut to shots of the engine in a chase scene.

Stay away from the fan noise, it’s pretty useless, in my opinion. Any mic you place in the engine compartment you should also consider drafting, you don’t want wind hitting your mic.

Don’t replicate your recordings unless it’s so necessary or incredible that you want to double cover it. having a back up is OK if the sound is really worthwhile. Normally try to stay away from having two high frequency whirl inside the engine compartment because that sound is really not that useful to a sound editor as say for example two muffler sounds. In the past I’ve made a couple of these mistakes and now I try to focus more on getting better muffler sounds. In that regard I’ve invested in large diaphragm condensers like the AKGC 4000B. Derek Vanderhorst recommended an EVR E20 I’ve also used my MKH60 (as crazy as that sounds…putting that mic under an Infinity that was so quiet I had to get really directional on the muffler with my MKH60 in order to bring out some low frequency from that car.

The main thing is find the good sounds, draft, stay away from the bad sounds that you don’t want to hear and choose your mics based on frequency response, high frequency mic for high frequency sound and if you record low frequency sounds then use a large diaphragm condenser. If you’re recording high SPL sound then you need to choose a mic that can really take a punch. For some high engine electronic sounds I use a simple COuntryman Lav that’s easily placed and hidden for drafting. In the interior either run a stereo Neumann or a boundary microphone near the pedals if you want more of a feeling of the driver’s position.

One of the mics I’ve been really happy with is the Sanken CUB 01 it’s a small boundary microphone, maybe a big bigger than a quarter, thin cable, the mic sounds good, it handles SPL well. It gravitates to medium low frequency to all the way up. For really deep muffler you can double with a large condenser but maybe for low end it might not be the ideal mic but it can certainly do a reasonable job.

When you are mounting your mics on a vehicle, there are a couple of considerations. If you have to move your mic or change your position you don’t want to be completely locked in so things like zip ties, tape, these kind of devices lock you in place making it very difficult to take it apart and change the mics positioning. Most of the times when we’re recording cars we have an hour, maybe an hour and a half depending on who you’re recording and how much they charge you really don’t have all the time in the world to set up. It’s important to set up fast to also not bore the people you’re working with, do things as quickly as possible without overlooking details. Also, when you’re out recording the wind can change, traffic can change..if it’s a cloudy day and the sky opens up then suddenly planes appear so don’t lose valuable recording time with long set ups, because you never know what’s going to happen.

Going back to my days of recording with Greg King, we came up with the idea of using bungee cords to mount mics on cars. They’re really good because what they do is they allow the mic to move a little but while keeping it in place. If you apply pressure or force to it, it has some give but not to the point where it’s going to move around while you’re driving.

The way to anchor the mics is to get under the car (elevate the car with some small ramps) and check for holes where the mic will be protected from wind and rocks and hook the bungee cord, place the mic. Then hook another bungee cord making an X so the mic is held in place in two directions. Then test the position by moving the mic with your hands and see how tight it is, what’s the probability of this mic popping out of this set up? If it’s still lose then add a third bungee cord to secure it.

I will use zip ties on cables, you don’t want a cable getting caught into the engine. This is mostly for safety, remember to think about this always, safety of the driver and safety of the recordist. If you’re the recordist and the driver is doings 100 mph and something happens and the cable inside the engine compartment gets yanked and pulled inside the engine causing the driver to lose control of the vehicle you could kill someone. So always think about safety.

Once all the mics are in place in the engine compartment, I’ll zip tie the XLR cable where it’s closest to the mic and then I’ll run all the cables on the same path all the way to the interior of the car. It’s not good to have cables coming out of every part of the hood, that creates more safety concerns.

Tape can be used on the exterior, just make sure you don’t ruin the paint or peel the paint off.

I’ve experimented with fishing poles on cars, I’d have to say that I’m not absolutely certain that is a useful technique. One of the things I was trying to achieve with the fishing pole on a muffler was, as a car is moving, and the sound is projected behind the muffler on a car, low frequency spread and they reflect off the pavement, off the back of the car and I wanted to get away from the really dry ECU muffler sound. The idea was to get a richer low frequency that sounded more natural, that was away from the car. The fishing pole increases wind because you’re not directly drafting, so the mic is more exposed to wind. There’s not too much movement, the fishing pole moves but the mic doesn’t. I’m still not absolutely positive is a way to go.

I’m definitely not a fan of suction cups, I’ve seen people use them and have mics exposed to the wind (directly into it) and any time you do that, anything over 20 or 30 MPH in my opinion gets very hard to use. For slow moves I could see suction cups being useful.

The driver is really critical, if they know how to manipulate a car then they’ll know how to make sounds that you want, especially when you’re close to a mic or when you’re doing your onboard sets. I try to find a driver who is either a professional or a mechanic and after that I’d probably go with a SFX recordist. A SFX recordist has typically recorded cars before or listened to car sets and he has an idea of what needs to be done. General people, especially when you have to do redundant sets (5 MPH, 10 MPH…), they get a little bored, especially with the 5 MPH (a “parade crawl”, a term I learned from the Soundstorm Library).

We needed to record cars and thinking about the moves, for example a “start and away”, we saw that we were losing a lot of time with the driver having to come back to do the move once more. Same thing with recording a set of “up and stop”, the driver had to go away from us and then do the “up and stop”, over and over at different speeds. So then seeing how we minimized time with the “pass by” moves (because the driver would do them both ways, going and coming back) we thought (probably Greg thought of it being the practical guy that he is) we could minimize the time by doing “start and away” and “up and stop” altogether. This led to the idea of doing the whole set of moves at once at one speed, starting with 5 MPH all the way up to 100 MPH. This would be useful for the sound editor working with the files, they need a 25 MPH pass by, they wouldn’t have to look for it in different files, they’d just go to the 25 MPH set and get it and move on.

Click on the image for bigger size

The moves are performed in a circuit (image). For the “start and away” moves the recordist is positioned slightly closer to the front of the car and for the “up and stop” the car stops and leaves the recordist slightly behind. We record “pass by” moves close, you can do medium moves at the end of the shoot.

The type of road I look for is a long 2 mile stretch of road, so you can get high speeds. For the “away” fast moves, you want the driver to keep up the speed, not have to drop the gas pedal to decrease speed to fit the road, the car should maintain its power as it goes away. The same for the “pass by”, if the car has to decelerate by the time it’s coming up to you, it’s not going to work.

As we always say, chose a location with no highways close by, no traffic and no airplanes. Also mind residents that might not be pleased with you recording there. Try and talk to people and explain what you’re doing. If someone goes by in their car while you’re shooting be friendly, wave or ask some random, friendly question, be nice. People will be less likely to have a negative reaction towards what you’re doing or call the police if they get a sense that you’re a nice guy just recording some cars.

Whether you’re on the south side or north side of the road, you have to factor in the direction of the wind or the direction of noise. What I always try to do is think about the good sound and bad sound. The car is the good sound, and wind or noise is the bad sound, so I want to have the noise at my back or the wind at my back and the car in the front. If the wind is coming from the “good sound” side, then you want to have it coming at you and pushing the bad sound away. For example, you’re standing next to the front of the car, the wind is coming at you and pushing that sound towards your mic and the bad sound from the background away from you.

If there’re are birds and insects then make sure you minimize that sound, taking out bird chirps when editing is a painful task. Someone once advised on using a scatter gun for birds but I’m not sure I want to be shooting anything off anywhere I’m recording, it’s going to attract more attention and usually residents don’t like people shooting around them, making big noises.

When you’re doing a show you can have reverse moves, J turns, doughnuts, three point turns, fishtails, swerves. Those are all great things to record that we’ve integrated in our list. We also have reverse burn outs (where it’s important to add fluids under the tires to prevent fire), break stands, driving in circles…just think of all the moves a car can make that are not in your series that you want to integrate into your list. In some cases a movie could have a very specific move. If you can get a look at it then try to map the move out as in the perspective of the shot in the film and then shoot that specific move. Some supervising sound editors prefer to have specific moves shot specifically based on the picture, they don’t want to be rummaging through the files to match the routines in the shots.

In the interior of the car, make sure the driver has his cell phone off, anything that makes noise in the car has to be out (no bags, lose items, change in the box, pens, nothing). I usually put the DEVA on the passenger front seat, strapped, you don’t want it to move around introducing noise into the recording. Make sure the cables are not moving. Also keep the screen of the DEVA visible to make sure it’s in record.

If you’ve ever read anything or talked to me, I’m a firm believer in “less talking more recording”. What I find with the walkie-talkie technique is that people end up spending a lot of time talking and not a lot of time recording. So what I like to do is I tell my recordists to record when the car comes up to them, when you start hearing it, record. I explain to the driver our routine, we do a test drive at a comfortable speed so they get the hang of it and as soon as they get that process down then when do one routine at 5 MPH, when he stops I go to the driver, standing next to the front of the car and say “10 MPH” give him a thumbs-up and he starts, idles and goes. When he comes back I record the “up and stop” and the routine continues. In this way we avoid any extra talking.

For the other recordists on the circuit, it’s OK to move the MIC if the sound is really loud. However, if the car isn’t going to fast and loud then the right way to move is to swivel your hips, move your torso following the car instead of moving just your arm which introduces more handling noise into the mic.

It’s important to make sure you wipe any pebbles or stones from under your feet, to minimize crackling when moving. The cleaner your recordings are the faster you’re going to finish editing and delivered to the sound editor.

We generally record pavement unless there’s a request for gravel or dirt. You can always add grit or gravel with foley or additional sound effects. Pavement is the general rule unless you’re doing something that’s all off road or if you’re doing something that’s all snow.

If you have the chance to record your “up and stop” or your “pass by” on a hill it will force the engine to work harder thus making the sound louder. Beware that at the end of a hill there’s usually a blind spot, if your driver is going fast up the hill he needs to be careful as there could be a bad accident.

Using the downside of the hill can be used to record a “neutral roll”, this is when you put the car in neutral with the engine off and you basically steer the car going downhill in neutral, so you’re getting just tire sounds.

Written by Rob Nokes for Designing Sound