Why I don't sleep at night.

About a month ago, I moved into a new apartment. It’s a great apartment – it’s really close to work, the roommates are cool, the house is great, I have a whole floor to myself, so there’s a ton of space and privacy. One catch that might concern some people is that it’s close to a train crossing (like, close enough that I can look out my window and see it). I wouldn’t normally consider this a big deal – as you can tell, I like trains, and even more generally, I’m not one to get worked up over loud noises now and then. Having researched the rail traffic patterns in this area, I know this particular branch gets very little traffic. My last apartment was within sight of both the commuter rail AND the turnpike, which are both MUCH more heavily trafficked than this new one, and I never had a problem at the old place. As it turns out, this new one only gets used once a day (occasionally twice a day), and only Monday through Friday.

Perfect, right?

Well… That one time is at 1:15am. The second time is at 4:15am.

Ok, so there’s a bunch of rumbling in the middle of the night – no big deal, right?

Well… On this one spur, within a mile of my house in either direction are no less than 7 road crossings, none of which have gates that drop – only lights and bells. That means that the engineer has to keep blowing the horn as he drives through town, so none of the townies get hamburgerized. AND, because the track is so old, he doesn’t go any faster than 15mph. Given that the town is ~2 miles across, that means it takes the train roughly 8 minutes to cross town. That’s 8 minutes of regular horn blowing. Approximately 1/3 to 1/2 of that time, he’s blowing it almost continuously.

So that’s 3-4 minutes of nearly constant train horn.

5 nights a weeks.

At 1:15am.

:-\

So… If I’m not going to be sleeping at 1:15am (and I’m not), I may as well expand my train library.

The up side is that there are plenty of good places to set up that don’t have a lot of ambient noise and are easy to get to – in most cases, I can just pull up my car and unload right where I’m placing the mics.

The three clips in this post use three different sets of microphones in three different arrangements. All were recorded into a Sound Devices 702 at 24/192.

The first is a pair of Josephson C42 cardioid condensers arranged in an ORTF pattern approximately 6′ off the ground, 15′-20′ away from the train, aimed directly perpendicular to the tracks.

http://soundcloud.com/dancostello-1/trains-20110425-115-c42-ortf

Not my favorite recording. The stereo image is weird, and I recorded at way too low of a level, so there’s more noise than there ought to be. There’s no soundcheck with this to get levels, so you just have to wing it.

The second is a mono track, recorded with my Sennheiser MKH-416T at the end of a boom pole (extended about 8′) and ultimately about 8′ from the train.

Not a bad recording. I have to work on my boom skills, though, as there’s some rumble in there towards the end. I need to experiment with the aiming, too – it was good at times and at others, I thought it could be better.

The third is the start of an ongoing experiment:

http://soundcloud.com/dancostello-1/trains-20110501-115-141-spaced

The microphones are a pair of Shure KSM141 multi-pattern microphones set to cardioid (can also do omni) with one mic on each side of the tracks, about 6′ out from the rails, aimed in the direction of approach, cambered slightly inwards. I don’t have a wireless rig to reach the mic on the opposite side of the tracks, but it turns out that I didn’t need one, because it’s pretty easy to run mic cables underneath the rails.

The reason I tried this setup is because since I’ve started recording trains, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get a stereo recording, with all of its nice ambience (great for distant horn blasts and bells), but without the horizontal motion through the soundfield that you get with something that’s physically moving from left-to-right, and without the imbalance at both the head and the tail of the recording (i.e. without having all the approach in one side and all the decay in the other). Also, I wanted to get the sound of the train coming AT you, not BY you. I’ve thought about hanging mics from overpasses to get the train as it goes under, and I’ve thought about recording from underneath an open-deck trestle, but so far neither of those have been feasible.

Then I realized that I could run cables UNDER the tracks. YAY for me! Possibilities unleashed! As far as this particular recording is concerned – it’s not bad. The sound quality is quite good, but the mic placement could use some work. The stereo image is SO wide that the left & right channels almost feel independent of each other, like I grabbed two different recordings and hard-panned them. I think that reposition the mics father away from the tracks could help with this, as could re-aiming them or switching them to omni. There’s some rumble in there, too, which makes the obvious point that I should have used shockmounts and not the standard Shure clips.

Keep an eye on the blog for future experiments with this setup, as I think there’s some potential there.