Kai Paquin - Sound Blog

A few questions crossing my mind a lot lately are: What is my thesis statement as a recordist? Why do I pick the things I want to record? How do I approach recordings? What are the things I want to keep improving on? I posed one of these questions to the field recording slack because sometimes the questions you pose for yourself are most easily answered by listening to others and seeing reflections from what they say. What's your approach to recording? I'm curious how different people here think about recording something and what their end goal is. For instance, you find some interesting sound while messing around and you realize this is your one shot to capture it. You have every tool in your arsenal, so what tools do you pick and what do you want to express in your performances. When do you start rolling and when do you cut? I'll take a stab at answering my own question in a follow up post , but for now I wanted to preserve these  really insightful responses for future re...

IRs are one of the things that have been elusive to me for years. Early in my career they were very esoteric. There were vauge notions you needed a starter pistol... or maybe a speaker and some sort of sine sweep? In the last couple years, there's been a few great blog posts and the community has shared tips here and there and the recording process has become more accessible. For anyone who's recorded an IR though, you might have noticed: this doesn't quite sound like how I remembered it. Like any recording (in my opinion) half of the product is done in the field, and half of the recording is done in editing and mastering. There's been a lot of talk about recording IRs, but not much about mastering IRs. I'm going to attempt writing a guide, but much like anything in sound, this is going to be drenched in personal opinion and hyperbole. I'll post some audio examples and hopefully the result will speak for its self. Before we jump in the guide, here's a list o...

Mics Left to Right:  Scheops  MK8,  MK41, Nevaton MC59-8 MC59-C, Sennheiser MKH8050, MKH30, MKH30, MKH40

The Problem with 192/32bit Recordings Edit: this not only applies to 192/32 recordings, but additionally to 24 bit multi ADC devices recorded at 192 like the Sony D100 or certain Sonosax recorders   One of the things we refer back to most on the field recording slack is issues recording at 192/32bit If you've ever run into this issue on 32bit recordings, you might have noticed weird bursts of noise above 50khz  Pictures via Aaron Brown How does 32bit recording work? In a single ADC 24bit recorder the pipeline works kinda like this: The microphone creates a very small electric signal that's fed into the recorder That signal is adjusted by a potentiometer (your gain knob) That signal is conditioned by a preamp That amplified signal is converted into a digital signal by an ADC (Analog Digital Converter) A 32bit recorder works like this (using the mixpre series as an example) The microphone creates a small electrical signal fed to the recorder That is amplified through 3 prea...

Over the years, we've had a number of really interesting topics talked about on the field recording slack that get referenced back to off and on but never have a permanent home. I've done a little work here and there trying to do things like give the technical documents a space on google drive, but I wanted to start a blog so I have one concrete place for people to refer to for things like mic shoot outs or technical information and ideas I refer back to. Take a look around and hopefully take away something good!