VIRB

In recent weeks I've been trying to put together a track for a comp. The pressure is on! It's a bit tough trying to assemble something 'good enough'. Whacking off (er, as it were) something efficient is easy enough, but making it count is difficult.

It's good to make everything count. A friend of mine intends to only release singles because he can't be bothered going to the effort of making an album full of filler. I respect that.

Anyway, I had another field recording anecdote. Two, in fact. A couple of weeks back I did a walk in a forest park north of where I live, and came across an area infested with tuis, a native songbird. Naturally I was prepared for this possibility and, armed with a microphone and my (previously mentioned) Rockbox-powered iRiver, I sat down and recorded these birds for about ten minutes. It was bliss! With the gain turned up it was like my hearing was enormous. Bird song and flowflies were zizzing in my ears. The flutter of a tui in a tree 20 feet away sounded like it was right next to me.

The value of this recording was a low signal to noise ratio. I don't mean in terms of the technical attribute of the recording, I mean signal (what I want) to background noise (extraneous sound). The area was quiet and the tuis were close so I managed to record without traffic sound, aircraft sound, or even water sound (in New Zealand you're never far from a stream, a magnificent source of white noise).

Something else I've been keen to record is cicadas, New Zealand's premier high decibel insect. Recording cicadas is another fraught exercise, because it's difficult to isolate one cicada and record it over the cumulative roar of thousands of the things. Today however I managed to record one with a slightly busted wing by following it round with a microphone, like a reporter doing an insectoid vox pop. I was lucky enough to have the cicada land on me and stay there, so I went inside my studio (in reality a glorified shack) and recorded the creature with very little noise. Needless to say, once I'd made my recording (and half-deafened myself in the process) I let the creature go.

Having gone to that effort I now need to work out how I'm going to use the samples. It may actually be some years before I find a way to use them. Sometimes, in fact, securing a sample is more interesting than using it.