Recently during Thanksgiving break, I returned home to Texas to see family over the holiday. While back home, I took the opportunity to make a big recording step in the process of my sound design reel. So far, I have been able to decently replicate or synthesize a majority of the sounds I have needed for my game reel except for a big one. While I’ve managed to make some good audio parallels to various sounds by recording an opening soda bottle, picking up and putting down a backpack, and looking like an all-around weirdo on campus with a box full of dirt so I can make footstep sounds, it’s kind of hard to get crisp recordings of gunshots while out of town for school.

While in Texas, my family and I went to a nearby shooting range where I also brought a H4n Pro audio recorder that I had checked out from the school. Although not a hyper-specific type of mic and also not the fanciest, the H4n was available at the time and I was familiar with using it. After making sure it was ok to record audio with management, we went to the range and recorded several firearms we selected and got some extra, yet still useful sounds created by other visitors at the range.

Because of the obviously very high energy of the sound of gunfire, I had to lower the gain on the recorder all the way to 1, and then 0.8 and 0.6. Because the gain was so extremely low, some details were bound to be lost but it also almost entirely removed the issue of clipping and it also cut out most sounds that weren’t gunfire aside from some occasional loud nearby talking. As far as the mic positioning, I made sure to have it behind the person firing to simulate being behind the gun itself in the game, but also slightly above the person so as not to cause too much sound dampening. Overall, I was able to get a good amount of recorded audio with some variety and should have a some very useful content to work with for sound designing as well as a new gained experience in recording.