On the second full day of our trip, after we did the garage recordings and picked up our fireworks stash, we headed over to Downtown Greenville, where there you can find tons of waterfalls in Falls Park! We brought the same two packages as before – Johnny had a CSS-5, and I had an MKH60, and of course I brought my hydrophone!
The layout of the park is pretty cool. At the top of the park, there is a large river that comes through Downtown Greenville. The river flows through a manmade waterway, and then goes over this cool manmade waterfall. We stopped at this waterfall first. It’s one of those cool waterfalls where the water comes off of the top in these kind of thin, clear “sheets”, but then crashes into white by the bottom of the fall. The feature was about 6 feet tall or so, and it emptied into little pools that were a about foot deep, so it made a nice low rumble. Johnny recorded this one from about 5 feet away from it.
About 25 feet downstream, the water went under a wide bridge. In that bridge was some sort of drainpipe that I thought was pretty cool. I stuck my MKH60 in the pipe, which sounded cool, but you could hear a little too much noise that I didn’t want in there (birds, people talking, traffic, etc…). So I tried out placing my hydrophone in the pipe. Sounded pretty sweet. Here’s a sample of what I picked up:
A bit further downriver, we ran into the biggest of the waterfalls. I would guess that it was about 25 feet tall. The cool thing about it was that it wasn’t just a waterfall at a cliff or something. Half of it just fell pretty much straight down, but the other half of it kind of cascaded down a few different rock faces. This created a very broad spectrum of sound. You had the low rumble of the larger cliff fall, but then you had all sorts of “mini falls” off to the sides creating a very interesting sound. Here’s a sample of a medium perspective recording of the fall. (This was the CSS-5, about 15 – 20 feet from the falls).
There was this tiny stream off to the side that met up with the bigger river. Right before it met with the river, there was a little bridge with a tiny little trickle under it. I would hardly call it a waterfall, since it was only a 1 – 2 foot drop, but you get the idea.
Lastly, the hydrophone. Exiting the part of the park we were in, there was this series of two last waterfalls. They were both fairly small. Probably about 5 feet tall, but they had a large volume of water going over them, and emptied into pretty deep pools (2 – 3 feet), so they were pretty loud. I threw my hydrophone out into one of them, and was able to get this pretty cool sound. I’m not quite sure yet what caused the frequency variations (it almost sounds like something was continuously being filled up and the poured out). Nonetheless, a very cool recording.
Well there you have it. Lot of water! As has become custom with this series, the recordings featured in this blog are available for download from SoundCloud in 96k/24b. Please keep in mind though that all sounds available for download for free still fall under the same license agreement that governs the premium libraries.
Thanks for tuning in! Keep your eyes peeled for more updates coming soon! The next blog is on recording fireworks and small explosives!