"Stephen Goodman" wrote in message
...

"Keith G" wrote in message
...
I've started messing about with open mic recording and am having a gas
with
all the usual humming, swearing, neighbour's lawnmower, birdsong etc.
accidental recordings but I'm also getting a little thump once in a
while
which looks like this on the recording:

http://www.apah69.dsl.pipex.com/keith_g/show/glitch.jpg

It's very likely the thermostat or boiler which are both brand new and
therefore quite silent, so I haven't been able to catch it 'at it' yet
but
what's mystifying me is why does it drag the waveform down which then
takes
about a 1/4 of a second to recover? It's nothing like a scratch (or the
tower of crap the old boiler used to add in to the proceedings) and
therefore damn near impossible to remove!

Anyone got a clue what's happening?

How about an old refrigerator kicking in, and causing either a surge or
drain on the power supplied to whatever you've got your mic hooked up to?

When in college in the late 70s all the recordings I made - both in-line
of
LPs and from a microphone - had an occasional warbled chirping noise that
wouldn't overdub the sounds being recorded, but rather sounded very
lightly
in the background. Whether during a quiet spot in the recording or a
Billy
Cobham drum solo, one could still hear this occasional weird sound that
lasted less than 1/4 of a second. It wasn't audible during the recording,
which was really weird. But it happened often enough that I sat and timed
the gaps between, and every time it was just between 12-13 minutes.

When I thought back on this - still thankfully having the fridge though no
longer at college several years later - I figured out timing the kicking
in
of the compressor on the fridge. It was between 12-13 minutes, same as
the
noise. I wasn't however experiencing the noise happening during recording
anymore - and put it down to the wiring in the dorm I was in at the time,
combined with the fridge kick-in and the Kenwood receiver I was taping
through during the entire span of time.

We didn't have surge protectors back then of course. One might wonder if
this would have been caught by one of the kind you can buy today for less
than 20 quid.


Got a surge protector - never prevented a surge yet AFAIK!!! Thanks anyway.

Love your link btw:

http://www.earthlight.net/HiddenTrack

Loads of cartoons taking the **** out of the RIAA and others worried about
piracy etc. and at the bottom of the page is:

"All contents ©2001-2003 Stephen P. Goodman/EarthLight Productions, all
rights reserved."

:-)