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 steady hovering, 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, bys, 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 for 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!

Metadata has been thoroughly fleshed out for this library which makes searching for these sounds quick and easy, allowing more time for creativity.

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.

Number of Files: 148 High Quality WAVS (63 minutes)
Size Unpacked: 3.04 GB
Sample Rate/Bit Depth: 96-192kHz // 24-bit
Gear Used: Microphones: Sennheiser MKH60 (follow mic on boom pole), Sennheiser MKH30/40 in MS setup, Barcus-Berry 4000XL Contact Microphone
Recorder: Roland R44 w/ Oade Low Noise Preamps
Preamp: Sound Devices MixPre

Here’s a quick demo video to show you how I made the library

Here is a selection of audio tracks you can preview from the library:

Full Track List Available Here:

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