Quadcopter Flight

This library was originally conceived while editing sound for a project that featured these buzzing beasts and I thought to myself: I should go out and record some quadcopters!

My main goal was to gather enough coverage of a large quadcopter in a quiet exterior location performing all possible actions. I captured everything from near perspectives as well as extremely distant perspectives on things like fly bys and aways.

I had a stationary mic setup capturing a detailed stereo image, as well as a follow shotgun mic that was mounted on a boom pole to stay near the action.
All of the exterior recordings were recorded at 96khz/24-bit.

In addition to the exterior recording session, I brought the large quadcopter as well as two other small quadcopters into a sound studio to capture extremely clean and crisp recordings free of ambient noise. As with the larger quadcopter, I captured the two mini quadcopters performing all actions that I imagined were possible, ranging from take offs, revs, sustained flight, and more. I even managed to record a few crashes (okay, these weren’t planned and ended up breaking the rotor on one of the quads, but it was worth it!).

I made sure to record all of this interior studio material at 192khz/24-bit in order unlock the full creative potential of sound designers to have fun warping the audio; this material sounds wild when played back at slower speeds! I even attached a contact mic onto the two smaller quads and captured some extremely smooth and high-tech servo/rotor sounds that can be used for sci-fi projects containing things like robots, sliding doors, and more.

I made sure to grab some Foley and beeps from the quadcopters as well, because you can never have too much of that stuff!

All in all, this library was a ton of fun to produce and I am confident it will be very useful for anyone looking to add some quadcopter sounds to their collection.