SFX Experiences Pt. 8 or Broken crockery brings you luck

As we told you in SFX Experiences Pt. 7, Konrad and Max teamed up with Saro from SoundBits to record glass debris! And their mission was to destroy as much glass as possible. Read more to learn how they miked up this session and what it needs to leave a room as clean as it was before. Enter the Special Event Sound Effects Team.

It’s not easy to find a room which is acoustically proved and can get pretty dirty. And with dirty I mean glass fragments everywhere you can think of. So if you haven’t a foley stage or a special room, you need find one which matches at least one of these requirements. Luckily we were allowed to record in a cellar at Konrad’s place. So the next step to ensure nice recordings was to set up some acoustic improvements in this room, as it was nearly empty and most of the surface was sheer concrete. We chose to record in one corner of the room. As we brought some acoustic foam and added some blankets to control the reverb, our office for this day looked like this:

Not the prettiest, but sounded not bad

The guys recorded the session with two setups.

Saro used his flagship stuff: A Sonosax R4+ and a SD Mix Pre D, alongside with some MKH8040 and ATE208, used as ORTF and MS setups. From what I saw so far, the Sonosax is an amazing recorder with huge up to date features, not to mention the pics.

Max used a simpler setup. A Zoom F4 with a SD 302 and a pair of Rode NT5 as ORTF and a AKG D112 pretty close to the surface. These two mics mixed together came out really nice , as the NT5 gave you the crisp high end sound and the D112 some lower style impacts.

They recorded different drops, smashes, surfaces and styles. But be aware, if you try this at home: wear glasses and gloves! You don’t want to end up in the hospital!
Here are some samples of the single files:

And if you haven’t heard it yet, some pub fight combos we did for St. Patrick’s Day:

Don’t underestimate the time you need to clean a room in which you dropped glass all day long! A combination of vacuum suckers, brushes and blankets helped to leave the room cleaner than it was before.

The guys had a great day. As smashing glass is satisfying in a remarkable kind of way. 🙂