Audio CAPTURED!

Here's a few pics from a recent audio capture session I did up in the North woods of Wisconsin. It was a mostly pleasant day, although the birds were rather bothersome background noise wise.
I spent a fair amount of time assembling my tools and then went to it, what follows is a brief synopsis of what I got.


Morning Rise.


Tools of the Trade: Trusty PowerBook, Rode NTG-2, Sennheiser HD-285, and various implements of noise making.


How to mic a pile of brush: Position stand away from possible falling limbs, press record, jump up and down, bonus points for falling through brush and into squirrel nest.
Coincidentally, now I know how they came up with sound of Georges beard growing in the Yellow Submarine!


Found this beauty of a log, mic'd it up and proceeded to chop/hack/slice/swing/saw it into oblivion. I leave behind the screams of treebark and the scars of my torture.


Nothing fancy, yo heave ho. The rocks and leaves make for an added level of detail, along with the dramatic flinging of debris.


Not since I was a wee lad have I had cause to bust out the old bow and arrow, was good to get it out and put it through it's paces. Culled 3 different sounds out of this session: bow release, impact, and debris. The mossy stump proved the perfect surface for eliciting a fine impact thud and debris scatter.


Mucky Muck, indeed! The sound of squishy-ness!


I love the sound of wet grass in the morning.


Like dry sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.


Wet sand has a bit more squish to it than you'd think, but when comparing the 2 types , wet sand is a bit crunchier,

Still have a fair amount of work to do whittling these down into a suitable library to work with, but the raw material for exciting noise adventures is there.

Next time, water sounds and other foresty goodness.
Stay Tuned

Quick Willie

Folks interested in checking out some partial Lab meanderings in Minneapolis will want to stop by the Southern Theater for this event featuring LCL Drummer and Willie August Project Co-Conspiritor Jeremy Hauer. (I hear there may be some pre-recorded LCL used as interludes for those of you interested in that angle)

Expect Greatness!

Southern Theater presents
EMPIRE AT TWILIGHT
by Ben Siems
An evening of new music, dance, and improvisational lighting design. Featured performers will include: Ben Siems on guitar and cello; The Willie August Project's Jeremy Hauer; legendary composer-improviser Carei Thomas; from New York, cellist-composer-choreographer Malina Rauschenfels; dancer-choreographer Jennifer Mack; and award-winning lighting designer Jeff Bartlett.

Feb. 28 and Mar. 1, 7:30 p.m.
pre-concert talks by Siems, Thomas and Rauschenfels at 7 p.m. both nights

TIX: $14 general;$10 student/senior
For reservations, call the Southern Theater at 612-340-1725, or visit www.southerntheater.org. For more information visit the NEWS section of this web site.

So This is the New Year

Just a quick update on the Valandil project, there's a Audio Demo Reel up that highlights the work of the Music and Sound Team. LCL provided the Sword/Armor&Impact/Arrow sounds culled from the previos posts audio capture sessions. Progress is moving slowly along, but the team is top notch!

Progress on the Playful Minds projects are going good, I hope to have examples up on the Demo Reel soon!

Started working with midi sound effects and music for e6. Ahh the fascinating world of non-standard format types and crap-tacular audio quality. Brilliant!

The band continues on the backburner...with high hopes for making a return to further experiments this year. Julie came up with a wild concept that would be good to excercise in the construct of our performances. She's a deep thinker, good to have her by my side. Magnificent!

Thora has a mad repetior at her command these days including, but not limited to: Baa Baa Black Sheep, Mary had a Little Lamb, ABCD's, Jingle Bells/Rudolph medly (one horse open sleigh tonight!), and Twinkle Twinkle...not to mention the free form ono freakout style vocal meanderings that spontaneusly erupt from the depths of her soul. Tremendous!

Here's the cutest pic of late!

Armor & Swordplay

Thanks to some fancy footwork and a little sweet talking I've been able to accumulate a bevy of medeival themed sound effects from the folks down at Badger Blades and Arms & Armor.

It all started with a caluculated trip to the MN Renaissance Festival where I fell in with Imp & Tiki manning the BB booth, where they were good enough to not only talk my ear off about the intracacies of weapon manufacturing, but also whack various swords together so that I could capture them digitally in all their splendor.

With that out of the way it was on to the other task at hand: the sound of violence!

As I was unable to find a volunteer to wear a suit of armor and agree to be endlessly pummeled, I opted for the next best thing and befriended Charles at the Arms and Armor booth. A computer geek as well, he was down with my quest and passed on what turned out to be a fortuitous forging of alliances.

After a bit of on-site field recording I left with a laptop full of sounds, and A&A main man Craig's email address.

I contacted Craig and he was up for a little impromptu banging on the beater set of armor at his shop. How luck was I that they're located in NE Minneapolis, 10 minuites from where I work! A true sound of battle veteran, Craig was able to coax the true sounds of combat out of a few pieces of armor in about an hour, and I then had a ton of stuff to head back to the lab and tweak.

These sounds proved to be heavily reverbed, and will work well for dungeon like interior spaces, but just wont cut it for the wide open outdoor vista's enviosioned by the Age of Chivalry Team for the HL2 Mod i'm working on.

So I dropped Craig another line, and he was gracious enough to loan out a partial set off the beater armor, and I went to task with the help of Jeremy's well stocked and beautifully envisoned studio space. Things couldnt have gone better! In no time I had beat/bent/rattled/scraped and coarced all the sounds I could imagine needing. (as well as a few i'm not quite sure what to do with :P)

If you add that to my recent medeival based projects for Playful Minds, you've got a recipe for some of the most authentic sound effects available for the genre.

I'll have some new sfx examples up on the DemoReel soon!