It is obvious (to sound engineers at least) what the effect of cupping a handheld microphone does to the polar response of directional microphones in live performances, which is popular in a lot of the metal genres, but DPA have gone and published an article about the effects on frequency response too, including a resonant … Read more Proper Hand Placement on a Vocal Mic
The Phonurgia Nova Awards is an international awards program for the sound arts that is held in France, and my work Beneath the Surface has been listed as a nominee in the Field Recording category. The event and judging will happen later this month, but you can read the list of nominees at: http://phonurgia.fr/2019/09/04/ears-without-borders/
Randy Thom, one of the greats of sound design, has a blog post about being creative and embracing accidents and mistakes. One of my favourite quotes from it is: A Craftsman knows how to avoid accidents — an Artist knows how to use them Randy Thom Read the full blog post at Randy’s website:
Last month I attended the Australian Wildlife Sound Recording Group’s Workshop which was held near Smiths Lake in NSW, Australia. It was a great week of sharing knowledge and experiences. A couple of the sessions that we did focused on hydrophones, and I was fortunate enough to be allowed to borrow a few different hydrophones … Read more Hydrophone Shoot-out
The Guardian recently produced a fantastic short podcast series discussing the issues of noise in the ocean and the effects of anthropogenic noise on the wildlife in the ocean. The series is presented by Chris Watson and you can listen in at: Episode 1: https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2019/may/03/oceans-of-noise-episode-one-science-weekly-podcastEpisode 2: https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2019/may/03/oceans-of-noise-episode-two-science-weekly-podcastEpisode 3: https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2019/may/03/oceans-of-noise-episode-three-science-weekly-podcast
I have been making some field recordings using hydrophones (underwater microphones) for a number of years now, mostly for general field recording, but also for Foley for some TV and film projects. I’ve had the opportunity to test out a couple of affordable options over the past couple of years. In no way do I … Read more Some things I have learnt about Hydrophones
I’ve been primarily using Triton Audio’s BigAmp Piezo preamps for piezo-based contact mic and hydrophone recording for years now. I previously used Hosa MIT-129 impedance matching transformers for the job, but I found that the BigAmp Piezos yielded me a better low frequency response thanks to the higher impedance. The Hosa MIT-129 hs a 50 … Read more Piezo Preamps and Transformers
I’ve written before about loudness specs for television and content for the web, but not so much for radio as such. From what I can tell there are no real hard specifications for loudness of radio ads here in Australia, and some sample ads I have checked out have quite a range of loudness values. … Read more Radio Ad Specs
A while back the Pro Tools Expert website posted up an article about setting up for mixing ambisonics for 360 video in Pro Tools which included four short tutorial videos. It is useful to help people get started with this sort of thing. Check out the article and videos at: https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/8/16/want-to-learn-how-to-get-started-ambisonics-in-pro-tools-ultimate-we-have-4-avid-tutorials-to-help-you-with-vr-immersive-mixing
At NAB 2019 TV Re-recording Mixer Scott Weber delivered a session about his experiences mixing TV shows to loudness specifications for different networks. He has some interesting experience and discusses adjusting acts or sections to meet specs, and ultimately, that it is best to mix as close to the spec as possible to avoid downstream … Read more Mixing TV to Loudness Specs Video