Tonebenders BLAST Interview

Tonebenders Podcast: Recording Explosions with Frank & Charles
August 2, 2024

Charles Maynes and Frank Bry have been friends and admirers of each other’s work for decades. They combined forces for the new sound effects library BLAST, that features incredible explosion recordings. They talk about the process of recording Tannerite, dynamite, debris and lots more. Plus they discuss their thoughts on 32bit recording, the importance of creativity in field recording and what is gained after years of practice with recorders and microphones.

Bits of the interview:

You know, Frank obviously is doing sound recording as his main vocation, which is amazing. And, you know, he had the incredibly great sense of moving to Idaho into a place that has just an amazing sound in general. So it’s like everything that is recorded by him in his locations always has an incredibly unique sound to it that is great sounding because, you know, there’s not a whole bunch of noises and stuff that he has to fight against.

Were you recording separately for Blast?

“Yes, we recorded separately. I’ll kind of give you the lowdown on how the whole thing evolved. I had been secretly working on this.

Ever since my first explosions library called Explosives, that came out in September of 2012. Hugely successful because at that point, there wasn’t an explosion library done by an independent person. Which by the way, I’ve never agreed with that word, but somehow it has stuck.

In 2013, I had moved to a new location, found a new armorer for my video game shoots and my personal product shoots. And I started talking to him about, let’s go out, start recording some explosion sounds. And I didn’t tell anybody.

This was not known. I spent six to seven years, sometimes by myself, shooting Tannerite. I became friends with someone who had a blasting license and he would do dynamite for me.

So I started gathering all this material in different locations. My goal is to someday do something. And when the pandemic hit, I talked to Charles and I was like, Charles, this is what I’m working on.

And I would love for us to tag team this, take both of our energies and the way that we view capturing sound, which some of it overlaps, and some of it is very different. Everybody does things according to their own instincts and guts. And Charles has wonderful instincts, which I’ve learned a lot from over the years.

And he definitely helped me quite a bit. Once my own vibration got involved into it and I had my sound, I called Charles and said, Hey, Charles, could you get some stuff for me that the way you record and with your contacts and your experience and who you know and your locations, which are completely different than mine. My goal is to merge these so you wouldn’t know that it was done by two people.

I hope we succeeded with that. I used to call Charles when I was finishing up the mastering of this library earlier this year. And he’s like, Frank, calm down. You’re like really excited about this. I’m like, Charles, I’m in SoundMiner playing through a hundred channels one after another, and every one of them blows me away. That is really rare for me. Charles recorded more and sent me more material. And I would tell him what I think we needed for this. And he left it kind of all up to me.

He threw in his ideas because we didn’t want it to be just your traditional boom, boom, booms in one place with multi microphones. That’s like so boring to me. You can get great sounds, but it’s one location.

I recorded at least 35 times. Sometimes I would only get three sounds. A lot of it was spontaneous. Like, hey, you want to go up in the woods? Sure, bring a couple of mics. Two hours later, you’re done and you got more material. It’s really started to gel about three years ago when Charles started recording and sending me things. And then the whole library sort of opened up, and we were able to add the artillery and the grenades, the cannons, the black powder, the gas explosions.”

Just about every single sound is a combination of me and Charles. There’s very few that are just me and just Charles. And I won’t tell you which ones you guys figured out.

I mean, Frank obviously had the vision for Blast. And I thought, well, for one, it’s like whatever Frank does, it’s like I’m immediately into. He just has a fantastic sense of recording.

And I think it’s really unique and it really does not reflect the common thinking of sound effects recording. It’s like he just has a really, really interesting point of view that he is exercising. Whenever he goes out, whether he’s recording guns or cars or whatever, thunder, I mean, he’s just hearing the world in a different way than I think most of the people in the film, video game milieu.

I just don’t think they’re hearing things in the same way that he does. A lot of the practices I’ve developed, for lack of a better word, I think are a little more typical. I mean, I try to do clever stuff with sound design with a microphone.

Frank really had the vision for it. I will coin this. I think the sound of Frank is, you know, the Idaho reverb.

If you have that Idaho reverb, you know it’s Frank. It’s just, it’s the only place where you get that sound. When we were doing Blast especially, I always had a sense of that sound being there.

Didn’t matter if I had recorded stuff in the desert or other places, it’s like it always had that character of Frank’s reverb sound, which I thought was super important. And Frank, I think I said this on a number of occasions, that it was like really important for people to know that it was that sound because it is a fantastically pleasing sound, and it’s a sound that, in my experience, works in almost any venue. For Seal Team, in this last season, we haven’t had a lot of big explosion moments, but I think that in every single episode that we did, the blast material was the highlighted material.

You know, it’s like, what’s the character? Charles had materially recorded that just added this unbelievable raw, busted up transient. And when it was mixed in with this totally pristine, clean thing, it just added this brand new element and fierceness to it.

You know, we record with such high end stuff and such a high resolution, you take the animal out of it.

We want to have the animal in it, which I think is where a lot of the blast material, I think, shines, is you have this envelope of high fidelity, and then there’s these little flecks and pieces of violence inside of it.

From Tonebenders Podcast: 271 – Recording Explosions with Frank & Charles