Bay Bryan's 'The Meadow' album launched this week!
I recorded bird and nature ambiences for a couple of the tracks back in 2021. It’s really great to be able to hear the full album now that it has finally been released into the wild! 🎶
Bay Bryan - The Meadow Album
I'm contributing field recordings to Bay Bryan's upcoming concept album 'The Meadow'!
This has been a really lovely & special project to be involved with.
Capturing outdoor ambiences of wind, water, leaves and birds (plus generating a few cheeky granular synth textures here and there) to go with Bay's music and lyrics was a fun creative process. I'm really looking forward to hearing the final mixes once they're ready.
Bay's first single 'Sticky Shadows' drops on 16th July - you can pre-save the track here: https://kycker.ffm.to/stickyshadows
For more info on the album, here’s a blog post from Bay: http://baybryan.co.uk/blog/2021/6/29/an-invitation-into-the-meadow⠀
Zoom H1n Recorder
I picked up a Zoom H1n recorder recently earlier this month as a way of encouraging myself to do more impromptu field recording.
While I like the Zoom H4n + H2n recorders I already own, I wanted to get something smaller and less bulky for use as convenient everyday recorder that I can always have on me to capture any interesting sounds I find whenever I’m out and about. The Zoom H4n is quite a big unit which makes carrying it around all the time not that practical for everyday use, and while the Zoom H2n is smaller in size, I find it picks up an awful lot of excessive handling noise, which isn’t that useful when it comes to making on-the-fly dynamic recordings.
I haven’t had the Zoom H1n that long to get a proper feel for its strengths and weaknesses yet, but I’m already really enjoying using it. Here’s some field recordings I made of some small babbling brook streams at a local park:
I’m quite pleased (and surprised) with how these recordings sound, especially considering I was recording outdoors without a windshield, without a grip or stand, and also in close proximity to splashing water!
The Spooky Jar - Kirsten McDowell
Boo!
I recently finished up some sound design work for my good friend and environment artist Kirsten McDowell on her Spooky Jar project, so here’s a quick post now that the project’s wrapped.
The Spooky Jar is an environment art scene that Kirsten made for her final year honours project at Futureworks. The bar’s design is inspired by the The Whiskey Jar, a whiskey bar (who’d have guessed?) in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Unlike the Whiskey Jar however, The Spooky Jar is home to some cheeky ghosts and ghoulies who have come out to play, and presumably neck a few drinks along the way!
You can see the scene in full detail and get more info on the design process by heading over to Kirsten’s ArtStation page to check out the bar and its 3D-modelled props in all their glory. Plus, while you’re in a link-clicking mood, you should also follow her on Twitter too so you can keep up with the rest of her environment and game design work as well!
Here’s a flythrough video showcase of the scene:
I worked on the sound design for this video showcase, which was a lot of fun! The brief was to create a spooky yet cosy vibe for the piece through area (non-positional) and source (positional) ambience sounds.
Most of the sounds I designed were sourced from my sound effects library, but I did get chance to do some field recording for a few choice elements in the scene. For example, to record the ouija board glass movement sounds, I grabbed my trusty (but hissy) H4n recorder, a wooden chopping board and a nice, weighty glass tumbler and had a good ol’ scrape about! After chucking the recordings into Reaper and applying a bit of EQ and Brusfri to remove top-end hiss and room tone, I had this:
I also recorded this creaky, crackly book which I intended to try and use for some of the dusty paper menus and posters in the scene.
However, although these crunchy book sounds were cool, I felt they didn’t work too well with my audio direction for the scene, and that they sounded a bit too over the top and out of place for the I overall mood I was aiming for, so I took them out. Not to worry though - I’ll no doubt go back to this recording for the next project that needs some extra crunchy ice sound design I think!
As I was mixing my sounds to a linear piece of media, and not implementing them directly into the UE4 project, I decided to replicate the feel of the audio being played back by the game engine by keeping a lot of the positional source sounds (door creaks, neon sign buzzes etc.) mono. This way, I could pan them around the environment according to the position of the camera, to give the feel the player is actively moving around the scene in engine in real-time.
Here’s a shot from my Reaper session where I’ve used track panning to position diegetic source sounds in the scene in relation to the position of the camera. In this sequence of shots (02:15 - 02:28) the camera gradually moves from left to right through the environment, so I positioned the creaks and closing sounds of the door in this shot according to where an in-game listener on the camera would likely pick them up.
Anyway, it’s coming up to closing time on this post, so thanks for having a look and listen to the sounds of The Spooky Jar - it was a short but sweet project that was great to work on! Stay safe out there folks! :)
Field Recording - Chorlton Ees Nature Reserve 21/06/19
I went to Chorlton Nature Reserve with Alex Larumbe and Aaron Taylor on Friday 21st June to record various natural ambience sounds. My original intention was for us to try and capture different bird ambiences, however on the day we actually ended up recording a bunch of different woodland foley sounds instead - things such as log impacts, twig snapping and foliage rustling.
Alex and me on our recording adventure!
We found a few of these cool wooden shelters at various points in the woods. Reminded me of the temporary structures you can build in The Forest!
We also got some good sounds from various metallic structures around the nature - e.g. squeaking metal hinges of the public footpath gates, and rattling of the rubbish bins - as well as some really great water sounds from the River Mersey which runs alongside the reserve.
Me busy coaxing some tasty squeaks and squeals out of a metal gate.
The River Mersey is right next to the nature reserve, so we stopped to capture some good water ambiences from it.
After a bit of a precarious climb down the side of the canal bank, we were able to get some good close-up sounds from the river as well.
On this trip we had to rely on just my Zoom H4n and Zoom H2n field recorders (as we sadly no longer have access to the treasure trove of mics and other field recording equipment at Futureworks now that I’ve finished my degree), but nonetheless I was still I was pleased with the quality of the recordings we were able to make using just the minimal kit I own.
My trusty H4n and H2n. Small, but mighty recorders!
Though the trees of reserve did soak up a lot of external noise, the distant roar of traffic could still be heard (particularly in the larger open field areas) and planes (presumably jetting off from Manchester airport) would pass by every now and again. Those caveats aside however, I was actually quite pleasantly surprised with the quality of sounds we were able to capture with this very budget setup.
I’ve still got to fully go through and clean up, edit and metadata-tag all the recordings from both recorders, but for now, here’s a video of some of the river ambiences we captured, plus some daft bonus footage of me frolicking and crunching around on twigs and branches. Enjoy!