Description
LA Underground is all about grit and the unseen. Charles describes his recent infatuation with underbelly of Los Angeles:
“I found myself interested in recording ambiences in really seedy/unsafe places downtown that made me think of some of my favorite LA crime dramas namely, Billy Friedkin’s “Too Live and Die in LA”, and Michael Mann’s films, “Heat” and “Collateral”. I found the locations for all those films to be an incredible juxtaposition of the common sunny depiction of Los Angeles which draws so many tourists… well, those tourists probably don’t go to these places….”
LA Underground 5.0. Charles describes the 5.0 surround update to the collection:
“I do like this collection of sounds, and I do use them myself pretty often- what this set is all about is 5.0 ambiences which were created as mixes, vs being multichannel recordings- I like multichannel recordings, but I have found that in my own usage of them in film and TV projects, I use them never…. I usually will grab a stereo pair, and add that to other sounds which which will go into a bed track- So this set, is 5.0 premixes using some of the material already in the collection, and some that is freshly added to make for some cool spaces – I do hope you like it!”
Technical Note from Charles: All files were recorded with a Sound Devices 744T, and a MS mic rig using the Oktava MK012, and its figure of eight adaptor. The mid mic was either a cardiod, or hypercardiod. The only processing used was volume adjustments to matrix the signals to L/R stereo. No EQ or any other processing was used.
Equipment Used:
Oktava MS (MK012 w/fig 8 adapter) | Sound Devices 744T
TECH SPECS
| Files | 122 |
| Sounds | 122 |
| Library Size | 22.53GB (Download: 19.33GB) |
| Format | Stereo/5.0 BWAV – 24bit, 96kHz | Mac-Windows |
| Metadata | Soundminer, BWAV, IXML |
| Available As | Download Only |
| PDF Sound List | XLS Sound List |
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Some backstory from Charles:
This libraries genesis was in response to a conversation I had with Michael about Mid Side stereo micing which over the coarse of about 2 hours, travelled a lot of paths- He encouraged me to write a blog post for Rabbit Ears about it, and did some mid-side city recordings as points of examples- from that, I sort of came up with the hair-brained idea (and I do have a bit of hair) of trying to record at some of the more iconic Los Angeles locations of modern film noir films- which for me were really defined by the films “To Live and Die in LA” (I recorded at the LA Harbor, near the Vincent Thomas Bridge, and in the LA RIver near the arts district) as well as films like Michael Mann’s “HEAT” and “Collateral” it was quite a fun experience, and after building a fairly substantial collection, we released it a few years ago.
One thing I was interested in experimenting with was having the library expand, so that release was the first Tranche of sounds that would become LA Underground- additional Tranches were recorded in San Diego’s downtown, and San Francisco’s downtown- mainly in the Tenderloin district. And finally an additional LA Tranche was finally released- the thing about this additional segments was that anyone who purchased the collection would be getting everything that was released following their purchase- so if one picked up the library when it was initially offered, they would have received the additional 3 segments of material- If they purchased later, they would have received the first segment, and then any segments that would have been released after they made their purchase.
This re-release has ALL the tranches of material.
So if you might have purchased the Rabbit Ears version, and not received the 3 additional segments, it’s a great time to get all of it at once for a pretty reasonable cost for over 22gb of fun and colorful city ambiences…
Charles Maynes: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0562825/
All Images and Sounds Copyright 2014 Charles Maynes – Licensed To: Creative Sound Design, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
