Sampling: Le Mans 2008

As you know I use a lot of samples in my music. Most of them I make myself. I use a mobile audio recorder for that. It is an Edirol R-09. I really love it. It is very small so I can put it in my pocket somewhere. It runs on 2 normal AA batteries and it records on a SD memory card. It has a build in stereo microphone that gives a great natural sound in my opinion. The R-09 can sample in high quality. Usually I record 24 bit WAV's in 44,1 Khz. So this is really CD quality.

The samples you hear in my tracks come sometimes from my daily life, sometimes even my backyard, but also I visit special events to record my sounds. I thought it would be nice to update you on my blog as well on the sounds that I record. You might hear them back later in some track :)

As you might have guessed from the car samples I used in my first album 'AeroDynamics' I like cars a lot. I visit car events regularly to watch some nice race or see and hear some special cars. Last weekend I left with a friend to the 24 hours race of Le Mans. Quite a long drive from my home. It was about 785 Kilometers and took us about 8 hours to get there. You can see the route we took on the map on the left. We avoided Paris because we would pass there around the busiest time of the day. So in stead we drove over Calais. From there also a lot of British car enthusiasts joined us on the highway.

The race in Le Mans is a very special one. It always starts at 15:00 in the afternoon and they literally drive for 24 hours after that. The car that has driver the most laps in this time wins. There are a couple of different classes that drive at the same time and this makes it special too. It is amazing to see how much difference there is in speed between these cars. But the most special thing is off course that they also drive at night. That is the most amazing time to watch this race. You can see the brake discs glow red in the dark and also see the flames from the exhausts when the cars shift down before a corner. Off course it is impossible to watch the race the whole 24 hours so we watched for 3 hours after the start and went back late in the evening and watched another 3 hours in the night.

We had a nice place on one of the tribunes. At night it rained a bit but we didn't get wet. This is also the place where I recorded the sounds and also filmed some stuff. I hope to make a track later with the Le Mans sounds and maybe even make a video with it. I put one sample online for you so you know how it sounds :)

http://www.synth.nl/samples/lemans2008.mp3