Shout-out to the great team at Dony & Pony

Want to take a moment to congratulate John, Dave and everyone and Dog & Pony for their profile in Mix magazine.

John took a chance on hiring me when I was fresh out of school and it's great to see that the studio he built up is getting some well-deserved national press.

While I don't long for the desert heat of Vegas, I miss the crew there and all the sounds coming out of the studio on a daily basis.

Disc Golf Putt Message Alert Tone

If you didn't already know, I love to disc golf! There are few sounds I enjoy hearing more than the clang of the chains when I sink a putt into a disc golf basket.

I wanted to customize my iPhone with my own unique alert sound for incoming messages. There are probably other disc golf sound effects out on the internet, but I never pass up an opportunity to record my own sounds.

Recorded at Red Ridge Disc Golf course:


The file is free to download. Read this article for an easy step by step guide on how convert the file into a .m4r tone to sync with your iPhone. Cheers!

My First Helicopter Ride

My girlfriend won a pair of tickets for a nighttime helicopter ride over the Las Vegas strip. I honestly don't like heights too much, but I definitely was not going to pass up an opportunity to bring my Zoom H1 recorder along.

The helicopters that Maverick Tours fly are EC-130s. Although it was a bit windy (as it tends to be regularly in Vegas), the views were excellent!

The entire duration of the flight (about 20 minutes) was recorded from an interior perspective behind the pilot. I edited the recording down and used iZotope RX to clean up and attenuate some of the high frequencies. Check it out:

Implosion Recording

The old Flamingo parking garage behind O'Sheas on Las Vegas Blvd was scheduled to be demolished at 2:30am on May 1st. I found out about it late in the evening, but of course I was staying up to not miss out on this opportunity. 
I took the Rode NT4 over the matched pair of Line CM3s because the NT4 has a higher max SPL. I knew that there was going to only be one shot at capturing such a loud sound, so I put the limiter on the Sound Devices MixPre and hoped for the best.
On a separate note, it was funny to see puzzled looks and hear drunk comments from people on the strip as I walked along with recording gear. Eventually after talking with security shutting down the area around the site, I was able to get as close as the local media across the Blvd to record the implosion.

This is my raw recording of the implosion:

The amount of dust was crazy!

Here is a cool video of the implosion from a spot above and behind the parking garage. Wish I could have set up to record from this position!