Recording Sound... and Knowledge Too

A key part of my sound design challenge for the year is doing a short journal entry to log what I’ve done each day.  I don’t spend a great deal of time on this part, maybe 5-10 minutes.  I will say though that this small one page report has been incredibly valuable so far.  It’s sort of like a sound design recipe book…  At the same time it’s a way to track some of my thought process and ideas.

One of my other goals this year was to write more blogs and share more with the community.  The problem has always been sitting down and getting started.. Especially when I have all kinds of other work that has to get done.  That’s the really neat thing about this journal; I already have about 50 rough draft ideas that I can easily expand and talk about.  Not just for blogs either, I’m actually going to give a presentation in April based on some of what I have in my notes.

I recommend journaling to anyone, especially in a creative industry.  It will free up your brain a little bit and make your already awesome ideas more accessible.  So basically journals = RAM for your brain.

Taking Advantage of Everyday Surroundings

I teach audio classes part time, which I’ve spoken about previously.  It’s a unique job not only because of what it entails but also because of the building I work in.  The Orlando Public Library’s main location downtown is an absolute beast of a building.  There’s nothing else to compare it to other than a castle.  It will be there in 10,000 years when they dig up Orlando (or visit it in a submarine?).

There are some really interesting sounding rooms and environments here.  Spoiler alert: impulse response library on the way.  So what’s all this got to do with a “speeder car”? well, here goes…

Futuristic Vehicles

Right off of our break room is a balcony (2nd story) that overlooks a main street running through downtown.  I usually will sit out there on lunch and it struck me as an interesting vantage point to record traffic.  The reflections between the buildings just sound really cool from here.  Also nobody is going to walk by and bother you; you can look as awkward as you need to with your rig setup.  You’ve got tables and chairs to sit at, and you’re also 20 feet from a fully functional kitchen.  It’s prime real estate.

I happened to be spending time listening back through some of these recordings and came across some really cool moments.  When just the right combination of vehicles go by together, you get some natural layering and it becomes it’s own thing.  It got me inspired to create some futuristic vehicle passbys using this as source material.

Here first is a clip of just the traffic by itself to give you an idea of what I started with.  I think it’s a combination of a few cars and one of the city busses.  This particular day I was armed with my Tascam DR-40 and probably just made a really quick recording while I was on break.

To expand on it a bit, I decided to thicken it up by layering in some samples from my personal analog synth library.  I didn’t really want much, just something to fill out the low end a little bit.

I used to use Pro-Tools frequency shifter plugin a lot to add some flare to this type of stuff, but it’s broken in the current version of PT…  The good news is I found an awesome replacement that is actually way better! That’s the Valhalla FreqEcho plug-in.  I’ve been messing around with this a lot over the last month; I’ll probably need to give it a little break soon.

Here is the traffic with the Valhalla plug-in running:

I mentioned also using a little bit of material from my analog synth library to fill out the low end.  I really just wanted to add this in to support what was already there.  I think it filled out the final concept pretty nicely:

Closing Remarks

I am pretty happy with what I came up with.  I think there is some value in the original recordings that lends itself well to this particular application.  The next time I’m tasked with designing some Sci-Fi Vehicles I’m going to look back at this.  I may even try doing some more recording with this end result in mind to get even better source material.

Final Design: