Recording the sound of vehicles is a very long and tedious process that requires many weeks to accomplish. There are many more steps that have to take place in order to produce a final organised sound collection, complete with metadata, ready to be used in sound editing. We rarely have the vehicle, time, budget, or place to do extensive sessions that cover all the movements and behaviours of a particular vehicle. Yes! We did it!

I introduce this sound collection, MPSFX_ENGINE01, the sounds of a very particular vehicle: a three-wheeled vehicle, the Campagna T-Rex 2006. These recordings are valuable as a construction kit for all sorts of vehicle related sound design, not just specifically for motorcycle sounds. They can easily be pitched or processed to fit all sorts of engine related sound design.

This collection of 198 sounds is ready to have a more public life through vehicle sound design.

The star of this collection is a Kawasaki 1200 CC motor. The vehicle is a three weeler motorcycle built in Quebec from Campagna Motors named the T-Rex.

Campagna T-Rex Specifications:
Drive Type Rear Wheel
Weight 1984 lbs | 899.927 kg
Engine Kawazaki IR1200
Engine Type I4 1164 cc | 71.0 cu in. | 1.2 L.
Horse Power 155 HP (114.08 KW) @ 9500 RPM
Torque 80 Ft-Lbs (108 NM) @ 7500 RPM
Performance 0-60 mph 4.1 seconds.
Top Speed 140 mph | 225.26 km/h

It has an incredible performance of 0-60 mph in 4.1 seconds! All the regular moves, such as pull away, pull up, and pass by at various speeds have been performed. We specifically focused on the sound of acceleration and deceleration with other kinds of movement that emphasize on the grinding and aggressive noises that this engine can produce. The driver surely knew how to pilot his vehicle! See for yourself:

These recordings have been assembled with the help of Jean-François Sauvé for recording and Paul Col for post production.

They were performed using a multi-microphone and recorder setup. The Sound Devices 744t was the primary recorder, and everything was recorded at 48 kHz/24 bits. For most of the moves, 6 tracks were recorded in sync; 4 outside the car (Schoeps MK4 and MK8 in an M/S configuration pointing at the moving vehicle, and a pair of DPA 4060 mounted stably in a binaural setup on a motorcycle helmet on the road), along with 2 omnidirectional stereo microphones inside the cockpit of the vehicle. Another set of 4 tracks were recorded inside the vehicle with the M/S configuration directed at the motor, while the DPA’s were set up to capture the sounds inside the cockpit. The M of the M/S pair should preferably be used as a mono source, as should the S, which has a very different texture, because the stereo image of a decoded M/S track will most of the time not give a proper stereo image of the action because the boom is pointing the car. For that reason I don’t recommend combining the two in stereo. The pair of omni’s on the helmet gave very impressive and bassy stereophonic pass bys. The result was split into 3 stereo pairs (A,B,C) or 2 stereo pairs (A,B) for the extra interior drive. All groups of sounds were edited and mastered in sync. All group items have identical length in order to facilitate syncing the various sound perspectives together, which you can vary in order to achieve the desired sound perspective. Syncing and layering exterior and interior sounds within a group is possible, and somewhat transparent, because the engine runs at the same speed (RPM) between sounds in the same group.

Here you can view selected descriptive metadata from the collection:

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