An Island

It has to be said that I have a pretty cool job. Over the years people have paid me to do all kinds of things that I would have happily done for free. Or even paid for myself. I’ve been paid to meet Spike Milligan. I’ve been paid to go to the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I’ve been paid to have a 70 piece orchestra perform some of my music. I don’t tell you this by way of boasting – I say it only because I marvel at the wonderful experiences that life has brought my way.[tippy title=”*”]Lest you think it’s all been beer and skittles, I’ve also been paid to record to a knee operation, stand on a beach in New Zealand in sub zero temperatures for most of the night and visit the scene of a freshly-committed domestic murder – none of which I desire to do again.[/tippy]

Next week, some nice people are paying me to journey to Masthead Island, a completely pristine South Pacific island near the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. I am going there to record sound material for a new Australian feature film for which I’m composing music.

This is where Masthead is, in relationship to mainland Australia:

An Island

Masthead Island is a coral cay, and protected part of Capricornia Cays National Park. It takes two plane trips and two boat trips – the better part of a day’s travel – to get to there from where I live. There is no power on the island, no water and no shelter. The maximum number of people allowed on the island at any one time is 25. We will be about an hour’s fast boat ride from the nearest settled place.

Stuff to take

This is my ‘lightweight’ recording kit. I’m taking my Zoom H4N digital recorder, and my sturdy RØDE NT4 (‘the rodent’) stereo microphone with its ‘fluffy dog’ windshield. There have been astonishing technical changes in my field since I started my career; the little Zoom recorder will allow me to record more than 6 hours of very high quality audio[tippy title=”†”]24bit/48k for all you tech heads – I can record at even higher and stupider levels of quality, but it would truly be a case of gilding the lily.[/tippy] on a 4g SD flash card. I’m taking 4 x 4g cards on this trip (and a big box of batteries, needless to say). 24+ continuous hours of recorded sound is more than enough for the 3 days I’ll be on the island.

When I first started in this business, the recording machine du jour was the Nagra 4 – a mono, reel-to-reel quarter inch tape recorder that cost a small fortune (I could never afford to own one) and weighed 6.4 kilograms (14lbs) with batteries. And that doesn’t include tapes, which typically allowed just 15 minutes of recording at the best possible quality. So, add another 4 kilos worth of tapes and mics and you can see that location recording was once a very weighty proposition. Lugging a Nagra around on a film shoot was almost guaranteed to give you back problems for weeks afterward.

My entire modern kit, including headphones, cables, microphone, windshield, recording media and enough batteries for a week, weighs less than half the weight of the Nagra recorder alone.

So. Off I go. It’s slightly daunting to be working somewhere so far from any modern facilities. There’s little tolerance for equipment malfunction so I’m relying on my tiny kit to hang in there. I’m nervous that I can’t back up any of my recordings immediately to disk as I do under normal circumstances. And I’m hoping that the production company, which is supplying our food, water and lodgings, hasn’t forgotten anything.

But I’ve met the rest of the crew and they seem like a decent bunch. And really, what could possibly go wrong?

Companions

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*Lest you think it’s all been beer and skittles, I’ve also been paid to record to a knee operation, stand on a beach in New Zealand in sub zero temperatures for most of the night and visit the scene of a freshly-committed domestic murder – none of which I desire to do again.

†24bit/48k for all you tech heads – I can record at even higher and stupider levels of quality, but it would truly be a case of gilding the lily.

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