(Photo by Dion Photography and the car courtesy of owner Garry Gilbert.)
Orlando, FL (October 15, 2024) — Watson Wu is who film, TV, and video game productions call when they want it loud. That doesn’t mean guitar amps that go to 11. Wu specializes in recording car engines, weapons fire, aircraft, power tools, explosions, and other high-SPL sources. With credits ranging from feature films like Baby Driver to megahit video games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Assassin’s Creed, he has become the industry leader in this vital niche of sound design. His work must be precise, not only because the extreme levels can damage microphones, but also due to the complexity of taking a sound that would be painful to experience in person and making it listenable in a media context – without diluting its dramatic impact. Wu relies on a single device for this task: the SPDR (Stereo Portable Digital Recorder) from Lectrosonics.
Asked to describe his job, Wu begins, “As Lectrosonics users go, I suppose I’m a little different because I’m not a mixer. I don’t record dialogue and I very seldom use wireless. I’m more like a sound designer or Foley recordist for loud sounds. A colleague took it even further and called me a recording artist because the gig is so specialized.”
One of the more specialized sources Wu has recorded was the sound of a vintage coal-fired locomotive for Amazon’s series The Underground Railroad. “They had footage of a steam train, but they hadn’t recorded sound,” he recalls. “I found and rented a train on six miles of private track. The rate included the engineer, conductor, and fireman guiding us the entire way. The most challenging source we recorded was the steam valve when it opened. I had to wear my hearing protection the entire time because the loudness was on par with a gunshot, but it was continuous loud, not a quick transient. I thought I would blow out at least one or two microphones, but the only thing we lost was a cable that got too covered with soot to keep.”
A similar challenge involving extended high levels was 2023’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which brought back the iconic slasher film as a video game. “I recorded the talent using the SPDR,” explains Wu. “The actor for the sound session, who was named Jason, swung a chainsaw around and I put two mics on him. That the SPDR is so compact was one of the first relevant things, as I was able to hide it under his large shirt and minimize any movement that could pull the cables and affect the mics. You can also lock the control panel so that if it brushes on something or the talent accidentally touches it, it won’t change any settings. We had to record all kinds of chainsaw moves and revs, and we actually bought two units of the same model chainsaw as the one in the movie. One had no chain for recording the motor sound more safely. One did so we could capture the sound of it slashing into an object. We even killed one of them by working it too hard!
“The SPDR is just so simple to use,” Wu continues. “I don’t like touchscreens as I work in direct sunlight a lot, and it has physical controls. It provides power for electret lavalier mics via the 5-pin connectors. You can run it from batteries or an external power supply, and access to the memory card is easy. The game developer CEO was with me a lot of the time, and I could just hand him the card, which he’d pop into his laptop. It made the workflow very smooth.”
Sound quality, of course, is even more important than user interface features, and Wu finds the SPDR well up to his many near-impossible recording tasks. “It has such pristine preamps, and they handle high SPL well — you can really crank it up and they don’t break a sweat,” he notes. “I set the SPDR’s gain very low, so that you can barely hear normal speech. This has enough dynamic range everything else. If I bump that signal up in my DAW by as much as 20 or 25dB, it’s still clean. It’s just incredible.”
The two-channel format of the SPDR makes it ideal for Wu’s automotive sessions, such as when he recorded vehicles for the game NHRA: Speed For All. “These top fuel dragsters are the loudest race cars in the world,” he says. “Drag racing is all about going very fast in a straight line, and some of these cars get to over 300 miles per hour in less than a quarter mile. So, you’re going from very quiet to very loud, and you also want to get some of the ambience of the track.
Wu approached this as he does most car sessions: with two mics. “For the engine I’ll use a lavalier designed for extreme SPL, into one channel of the SPDR,” he explains. “Then I record the exhaust into the other channel. For that I like a dynamic vocal mic with a tight pickup pattern, like supercardioid. I can put it a little off-axis from the pipe, so the fumes don’t blow right into it, and capture that throaty exhaust while still rejecting most of the wind and noise. Again, the dynamic range and gain handling of the SPDR preamps do an amazing job here.”
For transients such as gunshots, Wu also pairs his SPDR with microphones custom built for him by the Røde company. “I’ve been connected to them for a long time,” he says. “They made a couple of mics just for me, including one called the WU-2, a condenser that can handle up to 160dB up close. Then, the WU-1 is an omni dynamic I often use with the SPDR. As a field recorder, the SPDR gives me everything I need and nothing I don’t. I’m able to give my clients unique sounds that no other production has.”
Listen to sound examples of a 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 Watson Wu recorded with the Lectrosonics SPDR!
- File 1: Shelby GT500 engine only
- File 2: Shelby GT600 exhaust only
- File 3: Shelby GT500 engine and exhaust mix
About Lectrosonics
Well-respected within the film, broadcast, and theatre technical communities since 1971, Lectrosonics wireless microphone systems and audio processing products are used daily in mission-critical applications by audio engineers familiar with the company’s dedication to quality, customer service, and innovation. Lectrosonics received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award for its Digital Hybrid Wireless® technology and is a US manufacturer based in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Visit the company online at www.lectrosonics.com.
