One of the things I like to do with a few friends is ride bikes to a spot along the Mississippi river, light a fire, and have a few beers. It’s the best happy hour in town. At this particular spot it is not uncommon to catch the University of Minnesota row team practicing. Anticipating this possibility I decided to put a field recorder and microphone in my bag.
Unfortunately I did not have the foresight to bring extra batteries so all I was able to capture was this short section of a four man team going by followed by their coach in a motor boat with a megaphone. At this time of the evening the river is like glass, so shortly afterward you can hear their wake splashing on the beach.
Forgetting the batteries was not the only mistake I made. I also set the levels too low and although I was using a wind screen the recording was dominated by a low frequency wind rumble that would not have been there had I enabled the bass roll-off on the mic. I did my best to fix it by boosting the levels and running it through a high pass filter.
Row Team
Old monophonic synthesizers have had all sorts of ways to sequence notes; from fairly complex programmable sequencers to simple arpeggiation. Arpeggiators are nice because they sequence the notes that are played on the keyboard in realtime, allowing the performer to improvise while taking advantage of the capabilities of the machine at the same time. Based on the speed of the LFO, the arpeggiator on the Sequential Circuits Pro-One will sequence all the notes in a chord in either ascending order, descending order, or both. Other synths offer a feature to play the notes in a random sequence. In this example the notes are played in ascending order. I cranked up the LFO and added some delay so that the notes blend into each other so you can hear the harmony in the sequence. With this technique you can sort of simulate polyphony on a mono-synth. 
I programmed a couple of parameters in a VST synth to a controller, set a single note (C1) to play for three minutes and eleven seconds, then recorded the automation. The parameters I was manipulating in real time were the shape of the waveform and the frequency. After recording the automation I added a bit of compression, a nice slow chorus to give it a left to right sweep, and a short delay with a lot of feedback for some added atmosphere. The image is just a snapshot from my photos and has nothing to do with the sound, but you’ve gotta love stick figure warning messages. 
To make this 4:15 minutes long recording I found a creaky spot on the wooden floors of my house, rocked back and forth in place and pointed a stereo mic at my feet. I remember doing this years ago, but thought I’d give it another go using a faster sampling rate and bit depth so the quality is not reduced as much when pitched down. Before making the recording I set the sampling rate and bit depth to 96kHz and 24 bit. I pitched it down two octaves and then normalized the results before rendering the final output. 
This is only my second post on Audio Cookbook as I’ve been busy getting married in the last couple of months. Anyway, I’ve had more time to work on sounds and music (the organization of sound) and so I thought I would share a short segue tune that I’ve decided to include in my upcoming ten72 release Bicycle Family. The song sounds a bit like two other shorts that I’ve produced and helped produce. One is Baby Teeth from the ten72 release Flavour Country and Aerosol Eighty from the Keston and Westdal release One Day to Save All Life. This Short track has a working tittle of Teity which is my own alternate spelling of tidy. The programing is a mix of shorty little tidy samples mixed in with slick classic TR808 drum sounds. I played a really far out jazzy guitar melody over the top and it seemed out of place so I destroyed it with loads of filtering, dubby delay, and other fun tricks. The result is a nice contrast to the tidy bits. It flows in and out of the tiny sound particles like an electric stream.