USA - Watson Wu specialises in recording car engines, weapons fire, aircraft, power tools, explosions, and other high-SPL sources. With credits ranging from feature films like Baby Driver to megahit video games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Assassin’s Creed, he has become an industry leader in this niche of sound design.
His work must be precise, not only because the extreme levels can damage microphones, but also due to the complexity of taking a sound that would be painful to experience in person and making it listenable in a media context – without diluting its dramatic impact. Wu relies on a single device for this task: the SPDR (Stereo Portable Digital Recorder) from Lectrosonics.
Asked to describe his job, Wu begins: “As Lectrosonics users go, I suppose I’m a little different because I’m not a mixer. I don’t record dialogue and I very seldom use wireless. I’m more like a sound designer or Foley recordist for loud sounds. A colleague took it even further and called me a recording artist because the gig is so specialised.”
One of the more specialised sources Wu has recorded was the sound of a vintage coal-fired locomotive for Amazon’s series The Underground Railroad. “They had footage of a steam train, but they hadn’t recorded sound,” he recalls. “I found and rented a train on six miles of private track. The rate included the engineer, conductor, and fireman guiding us the entire way.
“The most challenging source we recorded was the steam valve when it opened. I had to wear my hearing protection the entire time because the loudness was on par with a gunshot, but it was continuous loud, not a quick transient. I thought I would blow out at least one or two microphones, but the only thing we lost was a cable that got too covered with soot to keep.”
A similar challenge involving extended high levels was 2023’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which brought back the iconic slasher film as a video game. “I recorded the talent using the SPDR,” explains Wu. “The actor for the sound session, who was named Jason, swung a chainsaw around and I put two mics on him. That the SPDR is so compact was one of the first relevant things, as I was able to hide it under his large shirt and minimise any movement that could pull the cables and affect the mics.”
“The SPDR is just so simple to use,” Wu continues. “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 five-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.”
The two-channel format of the SPDR makes it suitable for Wu’s automotive sessions, such as when he recorded vehicles for the game NHRA: Speed For All. “These top fuel dragsters are the loudest race cars in the world,” he says. “Drag racing is all about going very fast in a straight line, and some of these cars get to over 300 miles per hour in less than a quarter mile. So, you’re going from very quiet to very loud, and you also want to get some of the ambience of the track.”
“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. Again, the dynamic range and gain handling of the SPDR preamps do an amazing job here.”
