As many people know, I work as a sound effects/designer/composer for software development. Mostly this means I make sound effects for video games and write a little music as needed. Saying that I make sound effects is not entirely correct it would be more accurate to say that I capture and record sound effects though sometimes I actually do make the sound effect.
Lately a lot of great devices have become available to make portable recording easy. I recently purchased the Tascam DR-07 and a Zoom H2. They are both very nice devices. The Tascam came with a 2Gbyte SD card. The Zoom came with a 1Gbyte SD card. Both record fine. As I use them I will likely gravitate to one or the other and will write the results here in the future.
One of the keys to making money as a sound effects designer is to record a lot of sounds and that means a lot of sounds that are similar while recording. If you are recording rifles, record 100's of rifle sounds. What I find is that if you don't use them all for a game then you can sell them on the side as a sound effects pack, jam pack or ringtone or a dozen other ways. And its avaricious to note that when someone buys a particular sound effect of mine. They buy all of that type. If I have 3 rifle sounds, they buy all 3. If I have 25 rifle sounds they buy all 25. See what I mean? Anyway, its a strategy that seems to be working for me although I don't currently have any monkey sounds. I mainly do machine gun and automatic weapon sounds.
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After 2 weeks of owning this device, I am finding very few flaws and quite a few nice unexpected additions. Lets start with the good. I like the sub send. That has made working with other musicians a lot easier than just using the one headphone jack. Playback is very nice and clear. For someone like myself the sound processors have been usable. The mastering, microphone, line input mixing has made it very easy to get a very good sound without a lot of tweaking. The end result sounds really pretty nice on my crappy truck cd system. One of the downsides, is that when you stop recording sometimes the track set to record will revert back to track 1 regardless of what it was previously. I don't know why it would have this major flaw but it is definitely a large problem. I just keep an eye out for it because it happens a lot. In fact, about 30% of the time it will do this. Imagine if I have something nice recorded on track 1 and I overwrite it because of this problem. Anyway, hopefully, it will some day be fixed. But getting my classical guitar recorded has never been easier. So all in all I'm very happy with it.
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Eric Racine Petersen / Blog
Recording Sound Effects on the side
As many people know, I work as a sound effects/designer/composer for software development. Mostly this means I make sound effects for video games and write a little music as needed. Saying that I make sound effects is not entirely correct it would be more accurate to say that I capture and record sound effects though sometimes I actually do make the sound effect.
Lately a lot of great devices have become available to make portable recording easy. I recently purchased the Tascam DR-07 and a Zoom H2. They are both very nice devices. The Tascam came with a 2Gbyte SD card. The Zoom came with a 1Gbyte SD card. Both record fine. As I use them I will likely gravitate to one or the other and will write the results here in the future.
One of the keys to making money as a sound effects designer is to record a lot of sounds and that means a lot of sounds that are similar while recording. If you are recording rifles, record 100's of rifle sounds. What I find is that if you don't use them all for a game then you can sell them on the side as a sound effects pack, jam pack or ringtone or a dozen other ways. And its avaricious to note that when someone buys a particular sound effect of mine. They buy all of that type. If I have 3 rifle sounds, they buy all 3. If I have 25 rifle sounds they buy all 25. See what I mean? Anyway, its a strategy that seems to be working for me although I don't currently have any monkey sounds. I mainly do machine gun and automatic weapon sounds.
Reply
Zoom 16HD multitrack recorder
After 2 weeks of owning this device, I am finding very few flaws and quite a few nice unexpected additions. Lets start with the good. I like the sub send. That has made working with other musicians a lot easier than just using the one headphone jack. Playback is very nice and clear. For someone like myself the sound processors have been usable. The mastering, microphone, line input mixing has made it very easy to get a very good sound without a lot of tweaking. The end result sounds really pretty nice on my crappy truck cd system. One of the downsides, is that when you stop recording sometimes the track set to record will revert back to track 1 regardless of what it was previously. I don't know why it would have this major flaw but it is definitely a large problem. I just keep an eye out for it because it happens a lot. In fact, about 30% of the time it will do this. Imagine if I have something nice recorded on track 1 and I overwrite it because of this problem. Anyway, hopefully, it will some day be fixed. But getting my classical guitar recorded has never been easier. So all in all I'm very happy with it.
Reply