Whilst we spent time and brain cells to cut off air conditioned from a lot of recordings, some weeks ago, in the studio, my friend and owner at the place – João Azevedo – was looking at the air conditioned tube for the tenth time and saying ‘we should record this sometime. I’m sure that if we move the mic in here we’ll get a lot of cool sounds’. (pictures coming soon, I promise)

We did that. It was awesome; although I almost went out of breath, but it was worth it. We used a pop-filter to cause the air to hit the tube walls with much more impact, and we had a much powerful sound with that. The low rumble was intense.

We used an ATM250DE and placed it very closely to the end of the tube. The results in the dynamic were more responsive to the lower end and that’s what I used for these tracks.

So far, I used it for an animation sound design to create an intense space atmosphere (cannot unfortunately show the entire film), hence these 3 samples. These have automated EQ’ing, Wave’s GTR Stomp (just a little — if you notice a veeery discrete underline melody). It seems like everything that makes a sound is worth it.

http://soundcloud.com/melissapons/air-conditioned