Recording Workshop in Melbourne

Had the opportunity to head down to Melbourne for a sound recording workshop a week or so ago held by Stephan Schutze.  Stephan hired out a studio in Docklands for the day to record some things that aren't easy to record normally, like flaming torches and arrows and dry ice-on-metal, etc.

This is a quick picture I snapped of the space - impressively large!  Once the doors were closed it was wonderfully insulated from outside noise, but of course that massive expanse of concrete made for some incredible reflections!  I'll be curious to see how many of the final recordings that compromise.  Although the reflections sounded fairly epic in themselves, I kind of wanted to record an impulse response of it!

A lot of the workshop wound up covering familiar ground, but it was definitely a lot of fun just listening to someone be so enthusiastic about sound recording and share some of his recording anecdotes.  I think if the same workshop turned up three or four years ago it might have saved me a lot of lessons learnt the hard way!

There was far too much material covered for me to remark on at length, but the biggest points of interest I took away from it were:

1. Dry ice on metal is a very cool combination, and I have to find a way to play with this myself sometime.

2. He showed off a neat hack using a pair of lapel mics and a drilled-out manikin head as a cheap binaural microphone solution.  I'm extremely curious as to what the recordings of that one will sound like and how effective it is versus an actual binaural microphone.

3. Safety first!  Made me think twice about smashing up that vintage TV that I've been lugging around since University days.  Vaccuum tubes involve some fairly toxic chemicals, who knew!  Also when it comes to miking up a car, taking not only moving parts but heat into consideration, as well as wind noise not just from the car's movement but from within the motor itself.

4. For field recording, specialist groups will get you further than more generic approaches.  An interesting angle I hadn't considered before, but obvious in retrospect!

5. Splitting signals, having one channel running hot and the other at a much lower volume for safety.  This is something I normally try to do when recording with multiple microphones, but the idea of multiplying out the signal was an interesting one I'll have to explore at some point.

Perhaps I'll have more food for thought once the videos and recordings come out, but overall, it was a good experience (and also great to catch up with some of the other audio people present).  It's pretty rare to find any sort of audio workshop happening in Australia - plenty for music production but precious little dedicated to other audio disciplines!  So major props to Stephan for going out on a limb and organising it.