It’s Never Too Loud for Watson Wu

Orlando, FL (October 17, 2024)—Watson Wu specializes in recording car engines, weapons fire, aircraft, power tools, explosions and other high-SPL sources, and he relies on a single device for the task

With credits ranging from feature films like Baby Driver to video games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Assassin’s Creed, Wu has made himself a home in this niche of sound design. To help him in his work, he uses the SPDR (Stereo Portable Digital Recorder) from Lectrosonics.

Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs Capture ‘Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits’ – Part One

The two-channel format of the SPDR helps for Wu’s automotive sessions, such as when he recorded vehicles for the game NHRA: Speed For All. 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.”

Wu says, “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.”