Alessandro Mastroianni

The Sound Design Diaries #2: Geofón (free virtual instrument inside)

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Last year I purchased a Geofón, a special microphone made by LOM Audio.

I had been trying to buy it for a long time, as LOM is both a record label and a microphone manufacturer based in Bratislava and they don’t make very many units of their products: if you want one, you need to subscribe to their mailing list and they will tell you the next time a batch of a specific microphone is being made and is due to go live on their website.

When this happens, you need to move fast! Their stock runs out very quickly.

I know, managing to add a Geofón to your microphone collection sounds like a complicated business but trust me when I say it’s totally worth it.

What is a Geofón you ask?

Well, a geophone is a device that converts ground vibrations into electrical signals, and it is typically used to measure seismic activity.

The Geofón is… a geophone adjusted for field recording purposes: it can be attached to objects using the suction cup or the neodymium magnet included, or you can “plant it” in the ground using a metallic spike and capture even the faintest vibration in the surface.

Since I bought one, I put the Geofón to very good use: it gave me many hours of experimental recordings, growing my collection of textured, immersive elements that I have used in my sound design many times.

Some of these recordings ended up in Sonora Cinematic's Fieldworks Vol. 1 and you can see the Geófon in action in this video, which is also important as it shows me with rather ridiculous shorts:

I recorded bathroom fans, boilers, dehumidifiers, a towel rack… you can probably spot a recurring "plumbing/HVAC" theme, and indeed the Geófon is great at capturing this sort of sounds, which can easily be turned into eerie soundscapes with a bit of reverb or granular synthesis (or both!).

Several of these sounds also have a tonal quality which can be preserved and “tuned” in post-production, with great potential for musical applications (we’ll explore some of them in this blog).

My only regret is not buying two of them! I can really imagine capturing some very interesting sounds attaching two Geófons in slightly different parts of an object and running them in stereo…

Free Instrument and Samples

In my house there is a room covered with carpet and a specific spot of the floor sounds particularly hollow and bass-heavy every time you step on it (one of the wooden planks under the carpet must be loose or misplaced).

I captured the sound of my fist hitting the carpet in this spot with the Geófon, and the result is a fantastic sub layer I use any time I need more body on cinematic percussions, as the main ingredient for trailer booms or as a kick drum with an organic feel. I made a whole virtual instrument with this sound, it has several variations of it and many round robins. It is available both as a Kontakt instrument (Kontakt 6 Full necessary to run the library) or as a folder of wav files.

Here’s a video about recording and processing the sound:

And you can join our Discord community here to access the link to the free instrument.

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