Tips and suggestions about recording sound of old clocks/machinery

[GiuseppeS+OS]

Hi everyone,
I'd like to ask if anyone of you has experience recording the sound of ancient machinery and clocks. I have found this collector that amassed a huge number of antiques and I might have the opportunity to spend some hours at his place and record them.

My idea was to use a shotgun (Rose NTG 2) , a piezoelectric microphone ( a Schertler Basik) and a Tascam DR 60D as recorder. Yes guys, I'm on a not very large budget I'm curious about your techniques and recommendations, any suggestion would be highly appreciated.
Thank you in advance!

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[timprebble]

step 1 = test recording. It would be worth buying an old clock off ebay or from a junk store, so you can do test recordings and check results before you go & start recording with the collection. I'd imagine a ticking clock is going to be fairly quiet, so quiet preamps, mics with low self noise AND a quiet location are going to be essential. Once you are happy with the results in a controlled space, you will then have to deal with the actual locations acoustics etc and best time of day for low backgrounds... Sounds like a fun but painstaking challenge!

 

[Desire Inspires]

My advice: don’t do it.

There just isn’t a big enough market for this sort of thing.

 

[gsilbers]

maybe check out whats been done before to see how to play those sounds. kinetic metal is a good reference although it relies heavy on scripting and effects but you can hear the raw sounds.
also, the movie 3:10 to yuma used a granfather clock and manipulated it. check out the movie, not the ofical release as i think more of those type of sounds are not on beltramis score.

 

[dzilizzi]

Both Sonokinetic and 8Dio have clocks. I have both and find they make some interesting background sounds. There's also another company (Unearthed?) that recorded tapping and hits on various old machines. And 8Dio has a number of unusual percussion sounding things. I think if you manipulate the sounds it can be very interesting. But really, that wasn't what you were asking.

You might want to bring some kind of isolation equipment (boxes, blankets, etc...) if they are all in the same room. Otherwise, once you start one clock ticking, you may have to wait a while to record the next one. It's hard to plan for how long they each will go before running out. (thinking of antique wind up clocks) Any other machines that make noise, if they can be turned on and off should be okay. Anything that winds up, though, will have to wind down. I guess it also may depend on what you mean by antique equipment and what kind of noises you wan to make with them.

 

[timprebble]

My advice: don’t do it.

There just isn’t a big enough market for this sort of thing.

Just out of interest, which market/s are you referring to?
GiuseppeS+OS does not say which he is primarily targeting?

The examples @dzillizzi refers to (Sonokinetic, 8Dio) produce sounds primarily for music use...

Film/game audio sound design/sound effects editors always prefer raw 24/48 (minimum) or 24/96 wave files (not 16/44.1) with metadata...




As far as sound effects go there are currently five existing soundFX libraries available:

https://soundeffectssearch.com/find-a-sound-library/?library=clock

Tonsturm do great work & I am sure theirs would be very useful... Might be worth buying it as a reference since it sounds like you plan to record the same way as they did (contact mic + shotgun mic)

If you search SoundDogs it shows over 3k individual clock sounds
https://www.sounddogs.com/search?keywords=clock

Also another possibility/option is to record individual clocks for use in film/TV ambience
ie a ticking clock in a room... but in that case you would probably want to do close and wide recording....

 

[GiuseppeS+OS]

Hey guys,
first of all thank you everyone for your precious suggestions! Today I did a test recording with a cheap clock and shotgun + contact mic + a fair amount of denoising and gating did a very satisfying job.

Thank you also for giving me suggestions about the availability on the market of such kind of instruments, I knew almost all of them but my plan is to do something a bit different (can't say much at the moment ), which hopefully will be useful for both cinematic composers as people in post-production.

 

[Anders Wall]

Today I did a test recording with a cheap clock and shotgun + contact mic + a fair amount of denoising...

I was going to write don’t forget to record silence
If you haven’t then check out Diego Stocco and his work.
Sound magician (for DTS) might be a great start for inspiration.

Best of luck!
/Anders