A couple of weeks ago it was mentioned that you were using high and low frequencies on metal in order to imitate ships entering atmosphere. Can you go into more detail on that, and maybe any other interesting tactics you've used to get audio?
TL;DRThat was the ButtKicker session, where they vibrated scrapyard metal at different frequencies to gather source for ships entering atmosphere or under duress, and they also do bespoke recordings such as weapons and plan more.
That sounds like it's talking about the ButtKicker session that we were talking about.
Well, I think that's pretty much it. That's the ButtKicker session. We booked out a studio, padded out the live room, and we actually went to a scrapyard just down the road, and we threw all this scrap in the back of a van. We turned up and were like, "We want to vibrate your metal. Is that cool?" And the guy was like, "Yeah, all right." Don't really know how to take that. So we were going around hitting things, dodging rats. And then we took it to a big studio, and we got a Reaper session with a MIDI keyboard, played that through a synth into the ButtKicker.
It's my best work, I think.
And we just played different profiles and vibrated different constructions of metal and stuff. And that was really just to try and capture different materials vibrating at different frequencies, which we can use as source to implement for ships when you're coming into atmosphere or whenever a ship is under duress. But we've done other recording sessions. I think a while back we did a cool gun recording session at Copehill Down, which is a military training facility, and we recorded .50 caliber machine guns, a .50 caliber sniper rifle called the Destroyer. Now, I was about six meters away from that when it was being fired, and the pressure wave that came off that was like compressing my sinuses. It was insane. But that recording session wasn't about getting the shot of the weapon. We put microphones all over the simulated Eastern European town, and it was to get the reflections of all the weapons, like the slapback.
Reports, I think that's the terminology that Barney said. Reports of the weapon.
But yeah, we try and get out and record as much as we can. Because sometimes, frankly, the scope of this game is so vast, there isn't stuff there. There aren't libraries that we need to actually draw material from. So sometimes we have to go out and record bespoke stuff.
Yeah, we're going to do more of it as well. It's something we want to do more of over the next year, or forever, really. It's definitely one of the perks of getting out and getting stuff, knowing this hasn't been heard anywhere else. Especially the weapon stuff. There's so much scope.