New Theme for 2024: Insects

We have a lot of loud themes in the collection so for the latest theme I thought we could try our hand at capturing quieter, more delicate sounds.

So the obvious immediate challenge will be the signal to background noise balance. Extra quiet backgrounds will be necessary in order to get good recordings of these generally tiny sounds. If the sound is swamped by traffic and plane noise it won’t be useful.

The other issue is a lot of insects don’t stick around long enough to get a good consistent recording. In my first few experiments in the garden it was even harder than keeping crowd artists onmic! Well maybe not quite as hard as that, but tricky all the same.

Some insect sounds will be useful for ambiences, or even comedy spots such as a fly that won’t go away. However, feel free to use different mics and techniques to get more designy elements if possible – eg getting super close, clean recordings at high sample rates.

Collections of insects are useful too – eg beehives, ant’s nests (do they make much sound?), etc.

Good luck!