In addition to the 'mic collection' thread I thought I'd ask, "What are some of the strangest or most unique things or sounds that you've recorded with that mic collection?"

One of the things I'd like to get into is the dily where you go around with mics in your ears recording sounds. These sorts of recordings are amazing. They are best when listened to with headphones. It's almost like you exist in the skin of another human being. It can be spooky at times.

Of course, here in Oklahoma, there wouldn't be a lot of sounds to do it with unless you like the wind whistling down the plains.

But, if I lived in London, then I could see making some incredible recordings this way. You could walk through Victoria Station and then out on the street and into a musical.

how about using a fake head instead of a real head?

We used to have one of those in the lab when we worked on audio systems for cars. We actually had a car too!

I've not recorded anything strange...this thread is making me want something strange to come in! I do have a friend who is going around collecting everyday sounds like the rhythm of the gas pump, walking through leaves etc. and we're going to mix them together and loop them. He wants to record songs that use no traditional instruments, cool idea anyhow.

Hey, I did mic my front porch step once while it was raining and blend it in with an acoustic song for a friend. A car drove by and we even left it in. I doused it in reverb and it sounded like he was playing an acoustic in the rain under a bridge!

War

I wrote & recorded a song a long time ago called "The Watching TV Blues."

The second recording was done with my (now ex) brother-in-law. We only had a 4-track cassette at the time. We decided it would be cool to have a TV changing channels at the end of the song so we hooked up a TV audio output and punched in on a track. We changed channels randomly and eventually faded the music and left only the TV. Then after a particularly appropriate phrase we cut. It was pretty cool.

Not very strange but that's about as wierd as I've gotten.

I've done sound for a couple little/no budget movies, and recording foley is a lot of fun. I've recorded the things like the sound of crickets, a garage door opening, various car related noises, taking already recorded dialog and playing it over a telephone...all sorts of fun stuff.

There's all sorts of things that can be employed as percussion instrumenets.
One time I used a Kodak Carosel slide tray as a percussion instrument by
raking a thin guitar pick over the plastic fins. Mic'ed up with an RE 20, it
sounded really freaky.

Another time, I used a hand held bulk tape eraser to vibrate the strings on my
bass guitar, sort of like a 60 hz ebow. This made a great fog horn like tone.

I've also made a foot pedal controlled oscillator by taking the line out of an old
beater guitar amp, plugging that into my wah wah pedal, and running that back
into the input of the amp. This made horrible shrieking noises that could be
controlled by pumping the pedal. I made a recording of it during a free form
jam session, but it didn't blend too well with the other instruments.

Looping a series of sampled sounds is a cool way to make a rythm bed. I've done
the TV thing too, but I just held down the channel swithing button on the remote,
so that the TV was constantly changing channels, and giving quarter second sound
bites of each station.

Sticking a mic into the end of a long PVC pipe can also make some very strange
resonant reverbs.

i once recorded blank noise and picked up strange voices and stuff. sounded demonic and i could swear one said "get out!!".....i soon moved to another house

Dude! Somebody stole your idea and made a movie out of it!

When I was around 8 or so and my brother a year older, we had those black Panasonic handheld cassette recorders with the handle and built in condensor mic. We used to record all kinds of funny voices and Star Wars stuff and skits we made up, not to mention music that came on the radio.

One day we recorded a bunch of silly stuff, and upon playback it was not us. In fact, it was around 8 or 9 distinct voices speaking different languages. We had no clue what happened, and we were too young to recognize it as a supernatural occurrence. I remember being freaked out by it, but not as alarmed as I would be now as an adult.

I don't know what happened, but these were just blank Kmart tapes that we used. It was easy to distinguish the voices, and they did not appear to be speaking the same language. This is a small town in South Carolina with a population of maybe 4,000 so it wasn't the local radio station as we didn't have one.

Strange indeed, one of few things I can look back on in life and still not be able to figure out.

War

paranormal experts use a lot of audio recordings for things because they believe a sound signature cant just go away like that. when archeologists dig up pots and coffins, they put a nice condenser in it so record any echoes or maybe a spirit

a friend and i are looking up these things to see more into it, but not at my house. let the spirits haunt him, i enjoy sleeping, thank you very much.

I used to record in an old school in Sudbury MA. It was an ad-hoc arts center. My studio was in the basement. The bathrooms were upstairs and at night the pipes in the building would make grinding and murmuring noises. Late one eveing I decided to record some of these noises, so I made an extremely long mic cable and ran it up to the bathrooms on the third floor. I still have the recording and it is still extremely creepy sounding.
Pax, Steve

As far as the paranormal goes... I remember officing in a certain building. I work long hours. Sometimes, I work all night. I try not to anymore but sometimes it happens.

In the middle of night, the elevators would start moving. And, there'd be no one in the building. One day the janitor comes to me and asks me if I'd ever been there in the middle of the night. I said yes. He said, "Do you think there are ghosts in this building?" I said yes. He said he'd come in for something at 2 am and the elevators starting running. He thought maybe he was losing it mentally and was relieved to find that we had ghosts.

Our house has a friendly ghost who rarely make an appearance. In the most famous encounter, one night, my wife and I were lying in bed and someone comes bounding up the stairs. Except, there was no one there.

Most places I've lived or officed haven't had these sorts of issues.