thank you for posting this picture of Hildegard Westerkamp.
It’s from one of her travels to India in the 90s. From this trip she made recordings for the composition From the India Sound Journal. However, very remarkable are the three soundscape compositions that comprise her Into India album. Highly recommended listening experience!

here is a short interview of her talking about her recording/composition approach:

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Thank you for posting the background info and these great links about Westercamp. I have some listening and study ahead. I only recently came across her work, and am excited to learn about her.

you can give a look at Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology
and if you like to dive more deep into studying her music you can also read Sounding Places PhD, by Andra McCartney.
Of course, listening to her beautiful music comes first.

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Back again in my fave thread on lines!
I‘ve finally made my dream come true and bought a mixpre 10 :fist:t2: So many things i always wanted to record with a really nice sounding setup…it doesn’t deceive! What i love abt it is the no BS approach to menues and submenues-this is all very straight forward and does not need any rtfm at all. Go out-switch on-record! I‘ll be going down rabbit holes for mobile power solutions and carrier bags but that was expected…

One thing i will be doing intensely in the future is taking my music out in the field and record it back via speakers and microphones. Or record reverb impulses for my altiverb. I realised that for this i‘d need a separate player with my sounds or impulse sweeps to play over portable speakers. In theory its not possible with the mixpre (play and record played sounds) and its something that i haven’t tried yet. Maybe feeding audio from a laptop via USB into the mixpre? Will dive into its USB capabilities shortly :smiley:

Anyway, is anybody on here doing playing and recording with one machine? What are your best workflows?

PS: i was blown away by Bana Haffar‘s Intimations on the Touch: Label. I knew the sounds were gonna be good when i saw the selfmade Dummyhead and Ambisonic rig on her Instafeed. I hesitated because its a subscription only release…i stopped hesitating, subscribed and its its really nice!

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That’s actually the fun thing I fell in love with the Mixpre 6 I bought from a fellow member some weeks ago: for this particular head I have, it’s just so logical and fast to use for something as versatile as it is.

I hear you about the accessory madness, that always happens with things like this. I now have the 6 set up in a Strut bag designed for the model (highly recommended if you can stand a lot of velcro) with a pocket size 10 000 mAh USB-C power bank and the 4AA battery sled attached. The bag nicely fits a pair of in-ears inside in the headphone side (might still start using HD25s I now have instead as they seem more comfy on the long run), and a pair of mikroUši Pro mics in the side pocket ready to go - and I have a little case for a pair of hydrophones and a pair of contact mics I can throw into the backpack with me.

For my current lack of focus / time it seems to be essential that I can just grab something, go, and use it without being frustrated due to something being so complex to use that it’s only fun if you use it daily / weekly. This certainly fulfills those expectations.

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I thought there was a bit of software separately available for the MixPre for music overdub use - this:

With the Musician plugin activated, the following features are available:

Track Laying/Overdubbing – Record up to 12 tracks total: three at once on the MixPre-3 II, six at once on the MixPre-6 II, and eight at once on the MixPre-10 II.
Track Bouncing – Mix multiple tracks into one or two, freeing up more tracks for further overdubbing.
Punch In/Out – Automatically or manually drop in and out of record on armed tracks while playing back existing unarmed tracks.
Cue Markers – Navigate your song easily using cue markers
Effects – Add character by applying Reverb or Vocal Air
Metronome – Use the built-in, configurable metronome to keep your performance in time.
Input to Track Routing – Route any input to any track, reducing the need to re-plug inputs.
Mixing – During recording or playback, create a mix using fader knobs, pans, solos, mutes, and effects.
Rendering – Render (export) your song for sharing with others.
Import – Load a multichannel wav file from a DAW to use as the foundation of a new project or as a backing track for live performance.

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Whoa-thnx! I wasnt reading into this properly

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for IRs it means you could have an IR record session template with playback sweep preloaded and routed, and record tracks armed…

but I love the idea for eg overdubbing instruments etc, whether recording/overdubbing myself or someone else

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And just a couple of hours later i get your end of year email-as always great new ideas and that epic 2020 rant…thnx Tim!
PS a colleague at national swiss Television decided to buy your woosh collection and was slightly disappointed that it would not give him these epic trailer rippers we use everyf… time. I use them occasionally just because of your Pastafarian cat-makes me chuckle everytime :heart:

Heh, I am allergic to any library with the word “trailer” in it and could never bring myself to make such a thing. (I am old school enough to believe stylised sounds should be unique to the project, and created by the sound designer for that project, including the trailer. But I suspect a lot of that generic stuff gets cut in by the picture editor from their limited grab bag of “trailer soundz” and the cycle repeats again and again until even gentle dramas have massive booms & wooshes thrown at them… Sorry this is off topic /end rant… Merry xmas!)

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[quote=“papernoise, post:1148, topic:4644, full:true”]

As i have a Geofon since 3 days, this is my first impression. I did a test hooking it up to our washing machine first. Sounded as expected, lots of low mid rumble but not anywhere below 100hz. I then hooked it up to our inhouse radiators system-4 floors, 12 flats and maybe 20 radiators resonating. In a way a huge metal thing. I could sense the lowend when i opened the preamp although its hard to on Headphones. So two things came up: the geofon will always give you the low mids (apparently up to 1000hz) a sound that is possibly unwanted in most situations and because the really lo end is mostly much lower in level you need a lot of steep lopass filtering to actually hear/feel it-and thats not possible on headphones; you need monitoring with a sub. Nevertheless its a great tool to discover lowend! It needs experimenting with sources. Large metal constructions are perfect for this

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Handheld Audio Recorders (Q&A, share experiences)

Hi completely new to this group. I was looking for advice on the Usi Pro mics and the Clippy and stumbled upon you all and I am enjoying reading back all what you have shared. Loving it! I didn’t see this event happening which is sad, but just wanted to say nice to meet you all and thanks for such a nice space.

I am Ricardo, from Ecuador living in Montreal. I usually do classical music recording, but I am very excited to get back to field recording and this group is very inspiring.

Thanks and happy solstice to everyone!

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Hey! I think this is doable. I recently got upgraded to the MixPre10T, and I’ve used it for live streaming concerts while recording to the SD, to Protools and having the freedom of routing effects to the USB 1,2 outputs back to the mix pre.
You could definitely route your recorded tracks or swipes as stereo to loudspeakers while you record the actual space using both your DAW and the MixPre as separate mixers. Cheers and congrats on the MixPre10!

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Portable Audio Recorders (Q&A, share experiences)

Hide Aoki did a comparison recording using Geofon beside Barcus Berry contact mic… but to compare really need to roll off the BB recording at 1k as per the Geofon…

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Stereo field recording of the sound of high tension powerlines that cross the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. The electrical drone shifts as wind blows across the towers and the lines. Towards the beginning of the recording a woman rides by on horseback. Recorded with a MixPre 6 and a pair of Usi Pro mics. @speakerdamage

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Went out to record wind blowing through the forest yesterday with my trusty Zoom H1. The wind was very light but made a lovely sound in the forest. The recording was useless though, I believe that the sound was too soft so the noise floor was too prominent in the recording.

I have a MixPre3 and a stereo pair of Royer R10 and am considering carrying a mic stand out to see if that improves the results. I’m curious what a good stereo mic(s) would be instead the ribbons? I’d rather not use the Royer’s for field recording if this becomes a regular thing.

One perhaps obvious thing to watch out for is that wind can cause permanent damage to ribbon elements. Even though the R10 are sturdier than normal because have an internal windscreen to protect them, I assume (not sure!) there’s still a real risk that a stronger wind outdoors will damage the mics.

There’s plenty to choose from regarding stereo mics / mic pairs. If you don’t have a set idea of which mic technique to use and want to start on the cheap, a small matched pair of relatively low noise omnis like the Lom Uši Pro (available occasionally when Jonas makes a batch), Fel Clippy XLR (available regularly) or Naiant X-X low-noise version (available regularly but only ships to US addresses) with matching windshields, attached as AB stereo (eg. just a spaced pair), seems to be a simple but effective recipe.

Or, if you want single mic X-Y stereo, something like Rode NT4 seems to be a common relatively low-noise inexpensive choice (still about triple the price of one of the cheap lav mic pairs above though).

I have a pair of Lom Mikrouši Pro (smaller, slightly less low-noise version of the Uši Pro) with my MP6, and have been very happy so far.

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