DS: What are some of the airplanes that you've recorded? JA: Mostly World War II planes, and that usually happens two ways. Either I go to an air show and record them as best as conditions will permit. On other occasions I would just call the owner of a plane. Like Lefty Gardner, he had this beautiful twin engine P-38. He regularly performed at air shows. The Nazis called it … [Read more...]
Interview: John Altmann on recording airplanes – Part 1
John Altmann spent 20 years as a recording engineer, recording local San Francisco Bands and running his own studio in San Francisco, John Altmann Recording. He's also the owner of Aircraft Records and has spent the last 36 years recording airplanes. DS: Hi … [Read more...]
Flip the Phase
We decided to challenge ourselves a little this month by making our topic one that's open to some pretty wide interpretations...inversion. We could talk about the technical side of inversion, how it's the backbone of fighting induced noise in the "balanced" cables we use to run audio from one place to another, but there are more interesting interpretations for it. Maybe you … [Read more...]
Wayne Bell: The man behind the sounds of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
It was the summer of 1973 and Wayne Bell was part of a crew of young filmmakers making what would become the cult classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Forty-five years later, Wayne is still in Texas, doing what he loves and making sounds for films. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Wayne and gain some insight into the sound of The Texas Chain Saw … [Read more...]
Interview: Bijan Sharifi on LoFi sounds in documentaries
The topic this month is LoFi and I know just who to turn to, Bijan Sharifi from Berkeley Sound Artists. Bijan has worked on many films of various styles, but has focused a lot of time on documentaries. With over 75 films under his belt, he knows how to get the right LoFi sound when he needs it. DS: Hi Bijan and thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little about your … [Read more...]
Making Retro Video Game Sounds: Introduction to Trackers (1/4)
This is a guest post by Leonard J. Paul, a composer, sound designer and educator who first got his start working on Sega Genesis back in the '90s. You can reach him at the School of Video Game Audio (SoVGA.com) or on Twitter @VideoGameAudio at any time. … [Read more...]
Designing Sound With Artifacts – An Experiment
Whenever we add some sort of lo-fi effect to a sound we usually get two things, the removal of some details of the sound and the addition of artifacts. This can be a bunch of different things, like aliasing and quantization error in the case of bit crushing, distortion, speaker emulation, or the more complex artifacts created by data compression (mp3, aac etc.). I'm interested … [Read more...]