A Field Recording Guide by Chuck Russom

Chuck Russom has published on his blog an interesting article on field recording, providing the audio and the slides of his Field Recording Lecture at Game Developers Conference 2006. He talks about the importance of a good field recording, what’s inside the common field recording bag, how to get ready for a session, how to record sounds well, and more.

Audio

Slides

A few notes abot the gun and animal shoots that are featured in the talk:

The gun shoot was done over 2 days in the fall of 2005 just outside of Los Angeles. It was for the Sony PS3 game Warhawk. There were 3 recordists on that shoot. John Fasal was the lead recordist. Chris Clanin (Warhawk audio lead) and I were the other 2. The samples presented in the talk were taken from all 3 recordists (John ran the most channels, so a good number of samples are probably his, the Nagra was definitely his). I don’t remember how many channels we had or which samples came from which recorder.

The animal shoot was in spring of 2005 in Big Bear, CA. It was for a PS2 project I was working on at the time called Neopets (don’t look it up, it’s terrible). I brought along 2 other sound designers from Sony (Jeff Darby and Brad Aldredge) to assist me in recording, each recordist ran their own machine (either in stereo or mono). I remember I used a Fostex FR2 at 24bit 96K with a Sennehiser MKH40 mic. All of the animal samples are from my recordings.