Field recording

[zoundsabar]

Beautiful! Perfect conditions for an exemplary recording.

[Auguste]

Ah thank you! I had brought all my recording stuff in my bag for the walk and it was pouring the whole time, when we got to this pool the rain stopped just long enough to get a good length recording next to the water without worrying about my equipment getting soaked! A lucky recording

[Raoul_Papazorgl]

it sounds a little like torn polystyrene, it gave me goosebumps. Weird but really nice sound.

[_mark]

This is happening now for any folk interested:

Walking Festival of Sound / Artist talk with Chris Watson

[Modal_Future]

Hi everyone! Great thread so far… I’m just getting into field recording stuff, and I’m wondering how people process their recordings + integrate them into their compositions?

I’ve only ever really slapped the recording overtop of other sound sources/cut things up and rearranged them, but I’m sure there is a whole world of more detailed filtering, panning and other stuff that can be done and would love to hear what other people enjoy. Hopefully this is ok in this thread, I guess its more a process question than an equipment question eheh

[ermina]

i recently made a long piece where all material was taken from a few field recordings, of the “quiet place / distant few events” kind. Many ways of processing were used, all aiming to select/enhance/sublimate some aspect of the original recording, to guide the listener and weave places together in a comprehensible form.

Some processing was subtle, some extreme. A non-exhaustive list:

• functional selective filtering
• asymmetric modulated resonant stereo filtering
• deliberately wrongly set noise removal tools
• transposition above 5 kHz and time-stretching
• tiny amounts of many kinds of distortion
• cross-modulation
  There was probably a ton of other details but these are about what i remember without looking at the session — lots of layers, six months passed.

On the other hand, i am currently assembling an album of “almost untouched” field recordings. It is quite hard to evaluate the path of attention for a listener when things are not composed but a long take of wherever.

[ttasselm]

I’ve always treated field recordings as an opportunity to inject unique non-musical elements into my tracks, similar to the way tape hiss or other “character” traits in gear I love can enhance things…but with the added benefit of there being a personal experience behind it.

I tend to take a lot of recordings of environmental ambiences and the like, not focused on a specific “object” per se but more about documenting an experience. So in my compositional flow, I’ll listen back to my recordings and zero in on the specific traits and moments that appeal to me the most about that place, and made me remember to pull out the recorder in the first place…maybe there’s a particularly resonant sound or a pleasant texture in there that I can use. I rely a lot on aggressive filters and EQ tools to carve that out. But I also love to time stretch and freeze certain sounds in time; especially if it was a short moment. Whatever it takes to aggressively draw out that element and then add in to the music.

The INA-GRM plugin tools are great for this sort of experimentation (comb filter, freeze and whatnot) and they really lend themselves well to slicing, dicing and carving in this way. I also love the filtering tools in the Soundtoys plugs (Filterfreak especially but also the more experimental EQ tools in the delays and the pitch shifting in Crystallizer can be fun).

[Hovercraft]

I don’t have any particular formula for incorporating field recordings into my music and sound pieces. It’s guided by the concept and emotional content of the source material and the final piece. I work with certain motifs in my work, and both the collection of field recordings and the processing/building process are an attempt to flesh out a set of ideas. The process can be highly experimental, but the core is having intent before I turn the recorder on, and construct the track. But I’m not orthodox–if the intent leads somewhere unexpected–that’s good too.

To get a little more concrete (pun intended), I might incorporate the sound of footsteps as a narrative element in a performance, and I want the field recording to sound like footsteps in the final piece–so very little processing is needed. Other times, I use field recordings the same way I use a raw oscillator–as the starting point for sounds and timbres that after filtering/processing contribute an emotional element to a track.