I’ve got some recordings that I’ve made. one of them I didn’t make actually, which is this Rainforest one. this was made by the tab here for you guys for later.
these were made by a guy called Adrian Stoger and Adrian Stoger is like a sound person for documentaries and films and things. And he’s kindly, he put some of his film recordings up online and I’m using one in particular here because I, I thought it was pretty amazing. It’s the rainforest in Indonesia.
I, or did I get that wrong? Possibly, Sumatra, Indonesia or Sumatra, and he’s in the rainforest and there’s some monkeys and they’re communicating with each other and they make the most incredible sounds and at moments they sound like synthesizers. So I thought this was quite a good one to, to start with.
Here we go. Let me play you a bit of what I mean, And that bit in particular at the end there.
So later on I’m going to put this piece of audio into a, a granular synthesizer and we will zoom in sonically on that particular part and maybe we could use it as the sound of our own that bit there. So that, that I thought was quite nice. I’ll, I’ll be sharing these things with you. We’ll get into that later. And this was a, place in Berlin, which was an empty cous space, as you can see from the audio from the waveforms.
We were banging stuff in there, we were crashing things. So you’ve got this big transient, which leads to the echo of the chamber. Let me make sure this isn’t too loud. And lemme play you an example.
Sound the big, big space. This one. Quite an experience to be in there so you know where you guys are living.
I, I would encourage you to take in your surroundings and go out there with your phone. I, I went out with my phone yesterday and I recorded the sea. It was quite a, a big storm here and the waves were, were really big yesterday, so I went down to the beach with my phone and I, I just went into record and we’re going to use some of that today.
Here we go. Let play you a little bit here in Brighton where I live on the south coast of England, we’ve got pebbles on our beach. So they add quite a nice texture to this recording. Remember this is my phone, so it won’t be an amazing recording, but it’s not bad. I liked there where, where the waves went back towards the sea.
You can just about hear the pebbles. And I, well I’ve got quite a lot of them. I’ll be showing you some something that I find quite useful and interesting on that sound in a second. And here was some recordings from the underground in, in Tokyo from a few years ago.
These, these are quite nice just to let run in the background. here, here is an example. You see I keep grabbing this utility device. I’ll explain why in a second. Here’s, here’s the Japanese underground, Tokyo Underground. So this, this particular recording was made on one of the Zoom devices and it has like an XY mic configuration on the top of it.
So this, this, I quite like this recording. There’s a lot of clarity in it. So there’s a lot of things you can do with that particular recording because the quality of it is high.
Let me see if I can tell you what the quality of that is. It’s 44.1 kilohertz, 24 bit recording. So that’s the pretty decent. And this one of the c that I recorded yesterday is not so high quality. Ah, it’s imported it as a, as quite a decent format. It imported it at 48 kilohertz, which is higher than the other one.
and 16 bit, which is half of the other one. However, I happen to know that ’cause I recorded that on my phone. It’s an MP four. And I would not encourage using MP four formats for something that is gonna be used professionally or, or shared necessarily, maybe for an idea. It’s fine.
And this is why if I go back to that recording of the C and I’ve got this EQ here and I have a utility now, I said I’d tell you why I have this utility plugin in there, didn’t I? Now every time I went to a recording bar, the main forest, I dropped a utility device in there and there’s one there, there’s one there, there’s one there.
Now the reason I do that is because it would be the equivalent of reaching for a fader or the game part at the top of a, of a console. And I’m a stickler ’cause I’m a mixer, but I’m a stickler for not touching the faders. I prefer to leave my faders at zero at Unity game so that when I get to the mixing stage, I pretty much do all my level changes here with the utility, with the game plus minus 35 db.
So I, I would also, if I were you, I would get into the habit of maybe putting a utility or if you’re in logic, I believe it’s called gain. And in pro tools it’s called trim. I’m not sure for FL Studio and the other ones, but all the daws will have a device like, so I, I have that there just so if I play these drums at the same time as the rainforest, I will be able to very quickly get this, this recording of the rainforest at a good level without either blowing my speakers up or damaging mine or someone else’s hearing.
So I get the recording ready and I’m there minus 18 I’ll hit play.
And immediately I was able to balance that sound in with the drums, which I know were mixed to a good level ’cause I made the track. so try and get into the habit of using one of those devices if you don’t have a mixing console in front of you, which I don’t at this moment in time.
Okay, so that’s the utility explained it for me. This is a really, really vital tool to my workflow. The other vital tool when working with found sounds, there’ll be two that spring to mind.