Going Wild with Bernie Krause

Feb 21, 2007 2:54 PM, By Gino Robair

What do you think of the style of nature recording that was popular in the '70s?
It doesn't sound very good: it's technically not done very well. The stereo imaging is not very good. The depth and dimension is not very good. There's no indication that the recordist knows anything about the habitat they recorded in. There's no information in the notes about what creatures you're listening to.

All of our albums, and those of Lang Elliot and Ruth Happel, both of whom are fine recordists, are produced with the understanding that there is something we need to know about, beyond just the fact that it's an alpine wood. What's there? What are we listening to? Consequently, listeners have more information on the new titles that we're putting out.

And it's really important that recordists pay some attention to that kind of information. They'll record at one site in a national park. Well, in Yellow Stone alone, there are probably 70 different types of habitat. And they've recorded one, and they call it "Yellow Stone National Park."

We've just come back from Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon.

How much tape does that translate to: one, two...eight boxes of DATs?
It's a year's worth of recording at four sites, four different times of day for an hour at each site, over the course of a year. Let me tell you, we haven't got anything!

I was talking to one group that was doing a study (a group that we were commissioned to work with): they've got 26,000 hours from one place. Now you're getting the point.

What's represented there [Points to boxes of DATs.] is 80 hours worth of material from a Sequoia National Park project that we did last year for the National Park Service. For a lifetime of work — almost 35 years now — I have 3,500 hours of material. Compare that with 26,000 hours from one park. There's a lot of work to be done out there.

What is your current setup?
I record M-S, and then I transfer it to stereo through a matrix. I use an analog matrix because I like its continuously variable capabilities. Also, I like analog sound: I don't like 44.1 kHz. So I immediately convert my stuff out of 44.1 kHz on the DAT through some kind of analog process. I have to convert back to digital to get the CD, obviously.

You'll save that entire archive of tapes, even though there may be only a couple hours of useful stuff on there?
Sure. Because it's an indicator of the dynamic of that particular habitat.

Let's say you record a dawn chorus. The loudest part of the day during the spring, summer, and fall is, typically, during the dawn chorus. As soon as the sunlight hits, the creatures start to warm up their voices and sing. So there's this huge envelope of creature-sound density that occurs in the morning. And it falls off during the daytime. There's another one maybe an hour after sunrise that comes up, which is a secondary dawn chorus, and then it levels off for the rest of the day, depending on what the temperature gradient is. There is a dynamic there.

Then there's an evening chorus and a night-time chorus. So there are four different types of dynamic that you want to get during each session. It's a lot of work. And you only have one day's sample. Then you have to go back over several days to see what the layer and texturing is of those particular sites. We had four people working these four sites.

The base noise level, or noise floor, seems high on some nature recordings.
We don't use noise reduction on our recordings. And mics don't discriminate like our ears do (at least most mics don't discriminate). When you go outside, and your ear tells you you're in a relatively quite place, the mics will pick up ambient sound. They'll pick up wind through the leaves and the boughs of trees. They'll pick up a stream from a 1/4 mile or 1/2 mile away, even though it's a tiny stream. They'll pick up all kinds of stuff that you're not sensitive to. Even when you put on your earphones, you don't really hear it. It's not until you get back to the studio, and it's really quiet there, and all you hear is this damn hiss in the background. And you try and figure out where it came from.

We are trying to use equipment that has the lowest signal-to-noise ratio as possible. And for that reason we only use Sennheiser mics because, when the AES did a study on the noise floors of different mics, Sennheiser came out the best at that time. We've not used anything else since.

Another reason we use Sennheiser mics is because they've got a really nice dynamic range. And we can take them into habitats that are very humid, and they don't fail like some of the other mics do, like the ones from AKG and Schoeps.

We have all of those, but we don't use them very often because, unless the conditions are perfect outside — humidity under 70 percent, for example — they don't work very well. Also, the Sennheisers are a little bit less sensitive to wind noise then the others. But we still have to use wind screens and other equipment to quiet it down.

Which Sennheisers are they?
For most of my systems, I'm using the figure 8 MKH 30 and the cardioid MKH 40. They're mounted on top of one another. There are other mics out there: Sanken has a really good M-S system. Other people like to use other technologies, such as the Crown SASS-P system. I'm not too fond of that, and I'm not too fond of binaural because you've got to put on earphones in order to hear it.

The other reason I use M-S is because I get several options out of one recording. First, because of the mid mic, I'm able to get some directionality out of it. So, I'm able to get the single creature I'm aiming at.

Second, I get the figure-8 perspective, which gives me the instantaneous surround. That's a separate mono channel that I can use. It gives me the ambiance of the recording, minus the front and back.

The third thing I get is a wonderful stereo combination without the 3 dB level drop in the center channel, which happens when using an x/y or an ORTF stereo miking, and with most binaural systems. With the M-S system, the mid mic fills in the gap and gives you a much more robust stereo image than x/y, binaural, or ORTF.

The fourth thing is that I'm able to encode the mix signal into surround, if I don't do any processing to it, with any number of systems. We encode ours with surround data which works in almost any surround decode format: 5.1, Dolby Digital, and any of the others.

The last is if you don't do any signal processing, such as compression or heavy EQ, you can convert the stereo signal back into M-S again.

By running it back through a matrix?
Yes, you get the same results. Let me add that M-S is the least intuitive of the systems to use for recording. You have to learn to use it because the M-S signal is very confusing when you hear it in your headphones, unless you have the right kind of preamp (a preamp with an output on it that allows you to listen to things in stereo). Otherwise, you get the mid signal in your left ear and the side in your right. And it's very confusing when you're seeing things go by and you don't hear the spatial modulation that you would in a stereo recording.

But some M-S mics have a built-in decoder.
Some do. I have one here, the Sony ECM-MS 957. It's an M-S microphone that gives you a stereo result. It's converted within the tube to a stereo signal, and the stereo signal is what you record. If you wanted to reconvert it back into M-S you can. The stereo result from an M-S mic will sound significantly different than an x/y recording, and it can always be reprocessed and returned to an M-S signal.

There are preamps, like the Schoeps (although it's too damn noisy) that gives you an option of going right to stereo. Again, you can take your signal and put it back into M-S again after you've recorded it.

I use this now — it's from Sound Devices — and it is a great preamp. Now they have a preamp that has a headphone output that you can listen to things in stereo. But this offers just straight M-S.

You've glued down some of the switches?
Yes, I hot glue them. What happens is that when they're in the packs or in your pocket, the switches often move. I wouldn't know if they change. So I just glue them into position. You can pull the dried glue out quickly if you need to.

What else do you pack besides the Sony M1 DAT machine and the Sound Devices M-S preamp?
A gel cell, which is a battery that lasts me 18 hours of recording, powering both of these guys. This is a 48V version, or course, for the Sennheiser mics. I can run 18 hours with one battery charge. Plus my mics, 10 meters of coaxial cable, a Rycote zeppelin for the mics, and an aluminum tripod, which doesn't weigh more than a pound.

That gives me a month of recording. I can hike back and spend days out there.

[At this point, Krause takes me outside for a listen.] I hear a chainsaw. The white noise you hear is the stream. That would be the noise floor you would hear in a recording. When I did the recordings in Sumatra, for instance, I must have hiked 15 miles. I could never get away from the stream noise. That's part of the geophony: it's part of the signature of that place.

I thought it was the sound of the mic and recorder.
The noise floor of those Sennheisers is down 85 dB, and you're not going to hear them. And the Sound Devices preamp is really quiet. It's down there with the noise floor of the Sennheisers.

When I use my Schoeps mics, the noise floor comes way up, because you hear the electronics. When I use my Neumanns, it comes way up. They're wonderful mics, and when you have enough signal you don't notice it, because you're comparing signal to noise.

But if there were birds singing right now, it would drive you crazy to hear that stream, because that's what the mics would pick up. If there was a breeze right now, you'd hear the wind in all of these oak trees blowing through the limbs or the leaves. Again, it's part of the ambience of the space, and there isn't any way to get away from it.

You get those perfect moments, if you live long enough and you stay long enough, and you're patient enough. You get those perfect moments where everything conspires to work for you. But 80 percent of the time, that doesn't happen.

[We return to the studio, where we listen to recordings of some of his projects.]

What are we listening to?
This is Alpine Meadow (Miramar Recordings, 2002). You hear some ambient noise, but there's no way to get around that. That's the wind in the trees and the pines, but this was also recorded with a different kind of M-S system. This was recorded with a Neumann RSM 190 i, which tends to be noisy as opposed to this. [He plays Midsummer Nights (Miramar, 2003).] There, it's just a normal ambience of the environment. [Then, he plays Douglas Quin's Madagascar: Fragile Land (Miramar, 1998).] It's very low noise: there are no planes or boats.

They all have different levels of ambient noise, and the ambient noise is very much a part of the signature. If you're using gear at the level of quality as these Sennheiser mics, you're going to get very low-noise recordings. We take a lot of care with this stuff. Each one of these albums took me 100 hours to mix.

When people go out there to record, they don't realize they're recording in one habitat, and it isn't representative of the environment, because it's so diverse. When Ruth Happel and I were doing the desert recording in the panhandle of New Mexico, it was a wonderful place. There's a ranch of 500 square miles. No traffic. We heard one plane in two weeks.

When you go out to record in that kind of habitat, you quickly realize that even in the high desert, there are probably 50 or 60 different kinds of microhabitats within, each represented by a different sound signature.