First Field Recordings

By 1998 I was in the slow motion process of dropping out of University – I’d started a degree in Electrical Engineering, and the further I got into it the less I liked it! One of the few interesting elements was the anechoic chamber which I spent time in when I could…

Around the same time a couple of friends were at Ilam Fine Arts School. The drummer in my band was studying film, and via him I managed to start using their field recording equipment: a beautiful Nagra 4.2 and a Sennheiser MKH416 shotgun mic in a Rycote.

Prior to going to Film School in 1990, I spent a gap year living in an abandoned church in central Christchurch, playing in bands and starting to experiment making my own music and sound. And borrowing that Nagra and 416 whenever I could!

Sometimes the greatest motivator can be a lack of access, so whenever I had that Nagra I spent quality time with it – learning to record, and also learning to manipulate sound with it. Making tape loops, playing sounds backwards and splicing tape.

At one stage I had a part time job, working a nightshift at a gas station in the suburbs. I think their motive was that my meagre pay was cheaper than insurance, while mine was being paid to do very little. Except I didn’t – I did all sorts of things while I was at work, and remember a couple of people coming into the station about 2am, only to find the counter covered in bits of 1/4″ tape!

Another part time job I had was at a company who built sound systems – I mainly helped with assembly but I made friends with a hippy guy who worked in their machine shop. He built all the speaker enclosures so had a full workshop of saws, routers, drills etc… and I soon realised this was an opportunity not to be missed!

I managed to talk him into coming in to work during the weekend, and borrowed that trusty Nagra and 416 again and recorded a great little library of machine tools. One of my favourite sounds from that session was an air powered staple gun, I was recording at 15ips as much so i could slow sounds down as for the quality. And that staple gun sounded great at half speed.

I think those recordings would be the earliest recordings that are still in my library. At some point in the 90s I transferred them to DAT, at real speed and at half speed. And then a few years later digitised the DAT and added it to my growing CDROM sound library… and then as hard drives became affordable, copied the CDROMs to hard drive, and now to a NAS.

So here is a few of my earliest recordings, time travelling from 1988 to your ears now!