Audio Cookbook

Mendota Springs Sparkling Water Can Being Opened

Hi, my name is Graham O’Brien and I’m a drummer, audio engineer, and composer living in St. Paul, MN.  I play in some really fun bands around town (including Keston & Westdal!) and specialize in drumming and writing for sequenced music.  And having gotten a recording degree, I do some work recording and mixing radio commercials at Marketing Architects ad agency in Mineeapolis.  I also am building a drum recording studio in my basement that’s coming along really well and I’ll be posting plenty of really cool stuff from there.  Now, for my first post to Audio Cookbook.

This is a short but pristine recording of me opening a can of Mendota Springs Sparkling Water (Lemon flavor).  I recorded it at the radio production studio I work at, and the recording chain is amazing.  First we tuned and sound-proofed the recording booth down to -32dB of isolation.  Here’s the recording chain:

Neumann U87a  (cardiod pattern, hi pass off)> Great River Electronics MP-2NV Mercenary Edition Class A Mic Pre > Langevin Electro/Optical Compressor/limiter > Pro Tools HD via 192 i/o interface

This recording was done at 44.1Khz, 16bit.  The only processing I used is the Massey L2007 Limiter to make it louder: mendota-springs-can-loud

Mysterious Laundry Sounds

This sequence of sounds includes dragging a plastic laundry basket on a cement floor, opening and closing of the dryer, loading and unloading clothes, and so on.

Doing the Laundry

Dub Delayed Atmospheric Bubbles

This atmospheric effect is a continuation of the experiment from yesterday involving the Flying Waves VST. This time I loaded up a sample of air bubbles being blown into a glass of water. The original sound can be heard here. I also ran the output through an analog modeling delay and then recorded the results as I manipulated the pitch and volume. The result is a wet, atmospheric, psychedelic texture of ambiance. The next step I might would be to sweep the panning or apply some processing to spread the stereo spectrum since the output at this stage is still in mono.

Dub Delayed Atmospheric Bubbles

Sound Design for King Kong

On YouTube there are a total of seven excellent mini-documentary episodes on how the sound design was produced for Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong. Here’s the first of the seven videos. In this video Ethan Van der Ryn and Mike Hopkins explain why they prefer not to use sounds from pre-recorded libraries.

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Check out the rest of the videos on YouTube:
King Kong Sound Design Part 2
King Kong Sound Design Part 3
King Kong Sound Design Part 4
King Kong Sound Design Part 5
King Kong Sound Design Part 6
King Kong Sound Design Part 7