After trying the 60 engine recordings through a bass reflex speaker in a loco I have reluctantly decided that they are not going to be worth running with. Whilst the pounding bass sounds stunning through the hi-fi it simply isn't cutting it in model form. I need to go back and record again from two or three different places and hopefully I'll end up with something more usable. All the other sounds have been edited and sound great from the model so once the engine sounds are captured we're laughi
Ha ha ha ha ha, boom boom! He's not just a puppet, he's a British icon! The Tweed jacket, the refined accent, the toothy grin, the razor-sharp wit. Remember his constant interruptions that would cause 'Mr Roy' to grab him round the snout?! I'm laughing now just thinking about it. Pure TV heaven.
On the subject of brushes the most recent task has been upgrading the 92 project to v4 standards. I've yet to do a full recording session with one so a little artistic license has been used along wit
A week off work has enabled me to clear the decks of reblow work and progress loads of dormant modelling projects;
08 After cracking the sound, attention has moved on to the weathering job. I've tried to make mine look faded, oily and dirty similar to this one; http://www.flickr.co...9@N22/lightbox/ I'm really pleased with the results so far. I'll post some pictures once I'm finished.
108 After trying various methods of passing two wires down the train to the second speaker I've finally
Kids; here's a tip for when it's your turn to play the 'seeker' in a game of hide and seek. Reduce the time consuming count by saying 'one, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, a hundred' and off you go, job done.
Not really. Play fair, and eat all your greens too.
Yes, it's skip time in the sound lab as the Class 67 gets its v4 upgrade in readiness for the new Hornby model. And this time the model has a chance of sounding half-decent when you fit it because they have finally listened to critic
Take one Hornby 08, add two sugar cube speakers in the nose and the result? Gronk heaven!
Over the past few years I've tried about 6 different combinations of v3.5 chip and speaker (standard & micro chips, 23mm round and micro speakers. In the nose, in the cab etc etc) and have never achieved a sound even approaching acceptability. Having heard the superb sound from the sugar cubes in Paul Chetter's 03 at the LYDCC show, I thought I'll have to try these. They sat in the speaker box for s
You see there's two kinds of people in this world my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.
A classic line from a classic film, the relevance being; which of the three are these two in the photo, taken at Newton Heath during a recording visit in April 2010? The 180's are notoriously unreliable and the front end design could be good, bad or ugly depending upon your point of view. And the 142's, what can you say? Two Leyland Nationals on train wheels with no suspension. Th
Sometimes the simplest things can be a whole lot of fun. The 90's have got a really quirky sounding handbrake that operates automatically (via a push-button I think; I didn't see because I was outside recording the sound!). When it's applied the thing clunks and whirrs away quite loudly. When you take it off again the noise is the same but different. So the mind starts thinking, if I could work this feature into the sound project the loco could be realistically parked without shutting it down. A
There's a title to attract the attention of any male over a certain age! Well, here's something else that is electric and blue; 90012, posing for the camera during the recording session at Crown Point. I took the opportunity to grab a full set of underframe shots which I'll post if anyone is interested.
On Saturday I spent a really enjoyable half-hour talking to Phil Tyrer (aka Northendboy) at members day and he commented afterwards about being envious of some of the places I'd been whilst r
If there's one thing I've learned over the years about railway modelling and photography, it's this; take photos of the boring things as well as the interesting, because one day they won't be boring any more and you'll wish you took more photos of them. This Class 318 is a case in point. Despite living in Ayrshire for 16 years and seeing them almost daily I have only two photos. Now my Bratchell kit has arrived and......I wish I'd taken more photos. I think the same applies to recording sounds.
This week, the rain of Llangollen was swapped for the blistering 27-degree heat of East Anglia, with a Class 90 & DVT recording session at Norwich Crown Point, hosted by the fine fellows of Greater Anglia. My partner in crime this time was Richard Armstrong, aka the 'Armstrong Powerhouse' who produces sound packs for various Train Simulator packages.
The loco (90012, Royal Anglian Regiment) was in fine fettle and our assistant did a great job of getting the noises we wanted from it. Alth
Saint Collen's coracle would have come in handy over the weekend when the Chetter & Bishop 'dream team' paid a two-day recording visit to the Llangollen Railway at the kind invitation of the Llangollen Railcars Group. The weather was not kind, the wettest since Temple Mills in my case, but didn't hinder proceedings unduly. Four mics were pointed at the 108, Wickham (109) and 141 on several runs each up and down the full length of the line, producing some excellent under-load engine sounds. A
Orders for an 86 & 87 have prompted some v4 upgrade work to both sound projects. The flexibility of the v4 has enabled some nice features;
Wheelslip if you accelerate hard at slow speeds, neutral section now on a function key, howling rheostatic brakes if you decelerate hard, speed-dependant 'rail noise' and so on. My v3.5 had some of these but they were nowhere near as elegant and responsive. As usual, having a play has yielded new ideas, and led to improvements I'd like to roll out oth
Two models that came close to the lump hammer treatment this weekend were a Hornby 50 in 4mm and a Heljan 20 in 7mm, after I expended an inordinate amount of time on both.
The 50 is the Rail Express limited edition 50149, weathered by Grimy Times and destined to become the star in a You Tube video demonstrating my v4 Class 50 sounds. Yesterday I milled off the weight in the underframe and spent most of today building a long speaker enclosure to fit down the middle with cut-down tanks etc glu
Ding ding ding ding ding, can I have some order please! Younger viewers should turn over to Dick & Dom now.
XL'ing the Class 33 for v4 has highlighted one or two things about the project that I wasn't happy with. I also noticed that some improvements made to other projects hadn't found their way to the 33 yet so this evening was time to start putting this right. I'm not quite finished yet but the new version will have 'Multi-Start' (prime more than once, extend the cranking, have the loc
Although it is possible to load a sound project written for a standard (HO/OO) chip into a v4 XL, you tend to find that all of the bassy sounds are too loud when played through the bigger speaker, so relative volume levels have to be revisited. The bigger speaker also ruthlessly exposes any deficiencies in your clip editing. Any slight glitch leaps out at you, having been inaudible through a small speaker. First recipient of the treatment is my 26 project, which sounds great in my Heljan test-be
The arrival of the 85 from Bachmann has accelerated the conversion and upgrade of my v3.5 sound project to v4 standards. One of the more interesting features enabled by the v4 is an on-demand neutral section, triggered by a function key. Whilst running along at anything other than a very slow speed, pressing F11 causes the contactors to drop out and the blower motors to spool down. Pressing F11 again pulls the contactors back in and the blowers fire up again. Also of note is the ability to selec
These titles get worse, it took me at least 3 minutes to think that one up. Yes, ped-antics on my workbench this week as my Class 31 project gets its upgrade from v3.5 to v4. Relive the glory days of the Birmingham-Norwich in it's full audio splendour. The photo of such a working dates from Summer 82 and is one of my favourites from that period. Eagle-eyed viewers will note that it's running wrong-line through platform 1 at Nuneaton instead of the more usual 5 going in that direction (towards Le
It's not very often I finish two projects at once but that's what has happened this time. I have a policy of continuous improvement so I don't really consider any project as truly 'finished' but the Class 50 & 303 are both at the stage where I'm happy to release them into the wild. It will be a while before I do videos of either though.
As mentioned before the 50 comes with multistart which in this case means user-controlled priming and both cold and warm starts. It has two different set
In the olden days, before 50's were called Hoovers we used to refer to them as 'bleeps'. I have no idea where that name came from, or if it was in common usage. Answers on a postcard...
The photo is a vintage scene from Birmingham New Street in the late 70's. I wonder if Jim is planning to have hordes of spotters at the platform ends like this?! Those were the days.
The Class 50 project is shaping up nicely with a full set of auxiliary sounds recorded recently at the ELR. I've ended up u
A two-week course in Scotland provided an ideal spring-board for a bit of recording during the middle weekend. Various Scottish modellers have been asking me to record the sliding doors on a 303 and adapt my 304 project accordingly. However, with the help of the hard-working chaps at Bon'ess I've managed to go well beyond that and record almost all the sounds that the 303's made, including horns, driver & passenger doors, hustle alarm, main & auxiliary compressors, guard's right away bel
Things in Legomanbiffo's world have been extremely hectic lately, mainly due to three weeks of training in Manchester and Scotland, punctuated with a day's intensive recording session. The trip to Manchester gave a welcome opportunity for rail travel and photography, with stops at Crewe, Stockport and Manchester Picadilly on the way up. On the return journey I spent some time at the Crewe Heritage Centre with Brian Porter, trying to coax more sounds out of the APT. We had minor sucesses but it w
The 67 project was coming along nicely and it was time to start getting the sound vs speed relationship how I wanted it. I fired in some settings based on previous experience and ran the loco round and it was clear all was not well. Before I got to halfway on the throttle the sound had already worked its way up through every notch to full tilt! After studying the flowchart it dawned on me what had happened; the most recent software upgrade from ESU had corrected a discrepancy that has existed in
I wasn't planning to go to the Worcester show but the draw of a sunny day and the newly released London Midland 350 proved too much to resist. The show was only in one hall but there was a varied selection of quality layouts, a good cross-section of traders and plenty of second hand stuff. All in all most impressive. Sadly no rail blue Lima 73's (everything but in fact) so I settled for an NSE example to do the forthcoming video.
The 350 is a lovely model but as usual the chip and speaker fi
How long back do you think you would have to go to have seen a 60, followed by a 56, followed by a 37, going up the Lickey in the space of 15 minutes? 5 years, 10 years? Try two days! Many thanks to my pal Mark for alerting me to that one. It's a shame the weather wasn't great for pictures but the trip was worth it just for the listening pleasure.
In the sound lab the 73 is just about finished and about to be 'beta tested'. As with the real thing you can switch between diesel and electric on
I'm pleased to say that the Glasgow show was better than last year's, which was hopefully just a blip in the year-on-year improvement. Well done to all concerned. As usual it was great to meet up with old friends, and put some faces to new ones. Deviations on the way up included photting at Winwick Junction and Carlisle, and on the way back, Tower Models followed by fish & chips on the front at Blackpool!
Back in the sound lab the 73 diesel / electric transitions have been sorted out aft
