Sonic Stories: Adrian Franchi

Go behind the mic and hear from Adrian Franchi, an expert field recordist dedicated to capturing unique sounds where ever he goes.

What’s the most challenging sound effect you’ve ever tried to record, and what made it so difficult to capture properly?

I would have to say my Lockdown library required the most patience, and yes, it was challenging.

For the sake of my sanity, I usually aim to record sounds in very controlled environments. Obviously, that gets me the best results and reduces the amount of time I have to spend in RX afterward. But with Lockdown, the concept had to go completely against that.

Playing back designed emergency alarms through a PA speaker inside various industrial-like environments was a ridiculous idea. It seemed possible, and I knew the results would be worth it. I started by trying to get permission from different locations and slowly realized the headaches involved with that. So, I decided to go rogue instead. I shifted toward somewhat public locations. And I’m glad I did because some of the spots I found had the perfect industrial acoustics for the library.

I ended up finding various underground train stations, parking garages and parking lots that were free to walk into and practically silent between midnight and 4 a.m. I had a friend with me who helped position and adjust the playback system while I miked the spaces. I ran my Sennheiser 8040s in ORTF about 40 feet away, centered with the speaker. I also had a Zoom F3 in my pocket with a pair of LOM mikroUši mics hidden in my hat as a far perspective, which captured the room beautifully.

But, as always, nothing runs flawlessly when you’re blasting emergency signals in weird locations at weird hours. It created a lot of unwanted attention, so I had to move very quickly with my setups and teardowns. I remember encountering a very confused homeless man wondering what on earth we were doing.

All in all, I wound up with a pretty unique arsenal of real-world alarms, and I was genuinely impressed by how good they sounded once I got to editing them. Definitely worth the challenge!

When you arrive at a new recording location, what are the first things you listen for or assess before you start recording?

I like to avoid locations entirely unless the concept I’m trying to bring to life requires a much larger process that simply can’t be done in a studio environment. My newest library, Rift, has a good example of this.

I needed some very aggressive dragged-material sounds that required myself to scout a location. I had three things in mind:

1. Quiet and away from road noise.

2. Somewhere I could bring my car.

3. Gravel or some kind of rough terrain.

With those things in mind, I took a look at Google Earth and after scouring around for a while, managed to find a spot. When I first arrived it was perfect. The noise levels were great, the terrain was exactly what I needed, and I saw absolutely no one.

The next day, I packed my car with all the materials and gear and headed back. Of course, once I arrived and started recording, I was rudely interrupted by loud propeller planes flying overhead.

Unfortunately, I had to play the waiting game and take advantage of those little windows of silence whenever they appeared. It’s something you really can’t avoid. Planes are everywhere, and they contribute to a ridiculous amount of noise pollution when you’re trying to record clean sound effects. I think every field recordist suffers from this problem, there’s really not much you can do other than work around it.

For me, it was still doable but it goes to show that scouting a location once is never an accurate depiction of how that space is going to sound all the time. You can scout everything perfectly, pack all your gear, come back the next day ready to record and suddenly the conditions are completely different.

Planes will always win.

Do you have a favourite microphone or recording setup for sound effects, and what do you like about it?

Currently, I’ve tried just about every known stereo technique with my favourite microphones, the Sennheiser MKH 8040s. They’re cardioids, so they’re incredibly versatile when it comes to experimenting with the stereo field. Eventually, I started leaning toward lesser-known techniques and may have even stumbled onto one of my own that sounds amazing for close-proximity textures and really complements my style of recording.

The setup has the capsules spaced 21 cm apart and angled just 10° outward. It results in a mostly on-axis capture that still has a nice sense of width without becoming too wide, while maintaining decent mono compatibility. It also pairs really well with a center mic or additional mono layers.

Speaking of mono layers, one of my favourite things to do is find the “body” of a sound by placing a small microphone underneath, directly on, or sometimes even inside the source itself. I actually try to revolve a lot of my material-hunting process around that concept, and I’m a huge fan of LOM microphones for this kind of recording. Those hidden perspectives are usually some of the most interesting ones, and I like to sneak them into my stereo masters to give the sound a more in-your-face sense of clarity and proximity. When blended properly, that mono perspective complements the stereo recording really well and brings you much closer to the physical detail of the source.

What’s the most unusual or unexpected sound you’ve recorded that turned out to be far more useful than you expected?

I think the entirety of my Biohazard library was a pretty unusual concept. It was originally aimed directly at creating aggressive liquid textures for things like acid pools but after working on a few projects with some pretty heavy gore scenes, Biohazard quickly became my best friend for layering gore impacts.

While I was developing the library, I kept exploring the idea of what a sci-fi acid pool would actually sound like. I knew heat and pressure would need to be involved to create something aggressive enough, but I also wanted to submerge microphones directly into the liquid to capture as much texture as possible. Obviously, putting microphones anywhere near dangerously hot liquid wasn’t going to end well, so my workaround was to use a steam cleaner instead.

I started submerging the steam cleaner into gels, mush, soap, basically any dense liquid I could find that would react to high-pressure steam in an interesting way. The system I ended up building for Biohazard was a sound designer’s dream. Every liquid I threw into my DIY contraption produced a completely different timbre and the submerged microphones even captured these strange acoustic resonances from inside the material.

What I love most is that the library ended up being useful for something I never really intended it for. Those aggressive liquid textures work incredibly well underneath gore, flesh impacts, and other nasty organic sounds. I love when a library does that, when you build it around one very specific idea but the sounds end up taking on a life of their own and becoming useful for something completely different.

How much of a successful sound effects recording comes down to equipment versus microphone placement, environment and technique?

My philosophy with sound effects is to get everything sounding right during the recording process. I’ll start by listening to the space and catching anything that might seep into the microphones. If there are vents with HVAC noise, I’ll tape them up. I’ll unplug fridges, move anything that might rattle, and sometimes treat the room with blankets or panels to reduce unwanted reflections.

If I went into every recording with the mindset of “I’ll fix it in post,” I’d probably spend twice as long cleaning everything up afterward. The heavier the cleanup gets, the more you risk introducing artifacts and losing some of the natural character you worked so hard to capture in the first place.

Gear is definitely part of that equation too. Recorders and mic preamps generate noise, so having really clean preamps becomes especially important when you’re recording quiet or highly detailed material. I want the equipment to stay out of the way as much as possible and preserve what’s actually happening in front of the microphones.

Another thing I’ve really set my ways in is LCR recording. I find it incredibly effective because it gives editors a full spatial capture to work with while still giving them control over that center perspective. I also pay a lot of attention to frequency range. Having microphones that can capture beyond 20 kHz gives you much more material to work with when pitching sounds down, which can be a great asset for editors to have at their fingertips.

I’d say there’s really a handshake between a lot of things that have to align to make a good sound library. I’m always asking myself: “Is this actually beneficial to bring into the world of sound effects? Is there a way I can approach it differently or explore something that hasn’t really been done before? And how can I realistically execute it?”

The gear is part of that execution. I like to think of it as something that unlocks possibilities rather than something that creates the result for you. So yes, equipment is important and unfortunately, expensive but technique, environment, experimentation, and the idea itself are just as important.

For me, the real success is having fun with the process and growing as a sound designer along the way. There are so many things I’ve forced myself to learn simply because I had an end result in my head and needed to figure out how to get there.

Is there a sound, vehicle, location or event that’s still on your recording bucketlist?

I love finding inspiration from real-world events people have captured on YouTube. I remember seeing a video of someone filming a Category 5 hurricane from the top floor of a hotel. The sheer power of the wind was literally resonating through the building, and every tiny space it could force its way through was playing the environment like some kind of horror instrument.

Those are the hidden gems of inspiration for me as a sound designer, getting a glimpse into how an environment reacts to something so extreme and terrifying without necessarily having to be there yourself. You start hearing things you would never think to deliberately create: structures resonating, gaps whistling, materials flexing, and the entire building almost becoming part of the sound.

That being said, rather than throwing myself into a Category 5 hurricane with a microphone, it’s on my bucket list to build an arsenal of terrifying wind sounds using weird DIY instruments and ultrasonic microphones. I’d love to take what inspired me about those real-world recordings and find controlled ways of recreating that same sense of power and unpredictability.

A future library for another day.