Mec Sound of Nomads 游牧之声

From the Naren Summer Ranch

KEY FEATURES:
– The sound of ancient Kazakh nomads in China, will be lost.
– herds, horses and sheeps surrounded my mic
– The Naren river, massive valley and pinewoods
– 50 tracks of 5.0 version, 19.5GB
– 50 track of stereo, 8.1GB
– 96kHz, 24bit recording and post-production

BEHIND THE SOUND:
– Naren summer ranch is at the most western border of China. Most of the nomads are Kazakh.
They are probably the last nomads in China. Nomads move from ranch to ranch by following
the seasons. When I was there in September 2019, it’s the right time of they are moving from
the summer ranch to the winter ranch. Each family of them were busy on moving life stuffs and
animals. Animals sounds, herdsmen shouts and pickup trucks sound played together on
narrow soil roads in the deep mountain forests. In the early morning before sun rising,
herdsmen release their herds, sheeps, horses and even camels out from grids. Ox babies keeps
shouting and urgently looks for mothers. And ox mothers urge children to move. And herdsmen
bawl to the animals to keep the order……this kind of soundscape has been there for over 600
years. An now it will be gone. Because the mountains and environment there can’t undertake
so many animals. They are encouraged to settle down and hold less animals. Instead, the
tourism will bring more incoming to them. But it means, nomads life will be lost.

– It’s very difficult to enter and visit that place. I planed to recording pinewoods sound at there.
But after getting there, I found it’s wrong season because there is no wind. In the meantime, I
realized there is more valuable and precious sound at there – the life of nomads. It’s right time
and right place. So I moved my focus from pinewoods sound to their life, the animals and valley
river. Even I tried to capture the purely nature soundscape by placing mic at good position. It
shall be a living and well balanced mix in microphones and no need any multi-layers mixing in
post-production.

– In some of the recordings, there are trucks and bikes. I eventually decided to keep them.
Because they are part of current nomads life.

– DMS recording setup brings heavier challenges to find good and right position than stereo
recording. And it takes much more time on post-production. Certainly it bring more joy and
delights.I shall get there again during next spring.

– After carefully testing, finally I decided to have 5.0 and stereo versions. You can easily reduce
or simply mute the center track if you need Quad version. From DMS to 5.0 version, I basically
used the DMS plugin by Schoeps. This plugin really works well. The stereo version was not
simply from downmix or using the MS part. After sort of testing, I manually tuned and balanced
the sources particularly for the stereo version.

The Surround version include all Stereo tracks.