Synthesis and Sampling

Planning and Organisation

Before I started recording my samples I planned out a route to take around the Atrium and Cardiff city centre to gain the best possible results in the least time taken. I decided to start with the Café area inside the Atrium before moving out the back exit towards the railway bridge, where I could perhaps attain a train sample crossing its points. Also I wanted to get some footsteps walking underneath the bridge where there was a large amount of decay on the reverb due to its tunnel-like shape. I was lucky enough to get this because after waiting around for a train or two to ride past someone walking in high heels crossed the pavement, this was perfect as it gave the “cloppy” almost horse hoof sound I wanted. Next going up towards the zebra crossing I recorded some traffic and ambience noise before travelling across the road to find a rock being kicked along the hollow sounding tiles which paved the floor. This made for an interesting sound so I decided to drop the rock on the tiles and on a manhole or two to attain different timbres so I could pick and choose which sample would sound best to be edited and manipulated later.

I decided to go into a charity shop to see if there was anything worth recording, since charity shops aren’t characteristically known to be loud, and often contain a lot of miscellaneous items, one of which was the children’s play toy, (as heard in the beginning of the song). After this I continued round towards Queen Street before completing the circle and ending up back at the rear entrance of the Atrium.

I first recorded the samples using a Solid State HD portable recorder attained from the LRC. Using a Sennheiser E614, a small diaphragm condenser microphone I attached a wind shield and went in and around the Atrium and parts of Cardiff City Centre to record the samples. A few problems arose during this exercise, as there was no instruction manual with the solid state recorder, such as how to record onto different tracks which I eventually worked out. However, another problem was uploading the samples onto the digital audio workstation, (DAW). After trying it in the lesson room and failing because I did not have administrator privileges to install the devices driver to allow uploading I decided to take it down to the library to upload. Again however, the problem arose as to which “mode” to set the HD to, so with no instructions and a lot of error messages I decided to seek help from the LRC and their comprehensive foundation of knowledge…