Water is always very surprising sonically. Walking along the sea shore, which mostly was rocky, I found this great sound of water and air injecting between rocks, splashing and gurgling.

Later on I came back with my Sennheiser MKH 815 to record it. I found out there large variety of gurgles and bubbles. Using microphone foam came out to be a good idea for water protection, letting me to record very close at the same time. The splashes varied from soft to intense, some of them were also very funny sounding.

On the other day, I took my hydrophones and MKH 815 to record some under and over the surface perspectives. I was recording on Zoom H6. I really didn’t want my Sound Devices recorder to get wet and the opportunity of recording 6 tracks at the same time looked promising.

It soon came out, that wading in water on sharp rocks holding a mic was a bit challenging.
Waves were so strong, that I couldn’t hold hydrophones still in one place, not bumping on rocks. Below is a mix of H6 internal XY capsules and MKH 815, fading into a pair of JrF d-series hydrophones mixed with Aquarian Audio H2a (kind of LCR hydrophones setup).

 
The gurgles reminded me of a fountain I recorded some time ago visiting medieval palace garden.
I love finding and recording sounds with character.

Kind of a black hole in the city center. Because of amount of water in it, it makes many splashy, gurgling sounds which resonates inside the container.

The installation was located close to busy road, which made contemplation of it much harder and made it harder to record too. I wanted to try recording with hydrophone and contact mic plus some close shotgun mic takes.

So here is how it sounded from above, walking on and hitting it:

[Neumann KMR 81 & KM 120 MS pair | Sound Devices 702]

It came up that contact mic attached to it didn’t record anything really interesting. Just bumps, shakes of the surface and friction of wires. No water at all. I think it was because it’s built from something like gum, which is too thin and elastic. Contact mics prefer harder surfaces and even though it’s kind of membrane, it didn’t pick up anything useful. Using contact mics is always experimenting, which is amazing and fun.

But hydrophone worked great. We slipped it inside through valve and it gave us what we expected:

[Aquarian Audio H2a | Sound Devices MixPre | Sony PCM D50]

But speaking with the author before recording I came up with an idea of using physical resonators and putting mics inside of them. I wanted to create sound of being inside of something, to express in sound the idea of a hole in the city center.

Inspired by David Lynch technique used for recording music for Lost Highway pointed by Tim Prebble, I took some bottles and carafes of different shapes with me to record ambience of the place. Inside I slipped DPA 4060 mics. At the moment we wore headphones to check levels, we felt in love with the sound.

Every bottle gave different tonality:

[DPA 4060 | Sound Devices 702]

And mix of all resonators (no additional processing used):

I’m a big fan of using convolution reverbs, but reality can be much more interesting. And process of getting those sounds is the same exciting.