One of our ongoing projects at Cruden is the development of a 6-DOF motorcycle simulator for professional use. You will read more about this in the coming weeks and months. To record the audio, we recently took a Yamaha R6 and a Ducati 848 Evo to an airstrip and brought in field recording experts from SONiC FUEL.

The process involved attaching up to five specialist heat resistant microphones onto the body of the bike and performing various specific maneuvers whilst recording clean and characteristic sweeps. Instructions were given to the driver by the sound engineer too, for instance: constantly accelerate from idle up the red line, hold specific RPMs and engine braking events. Motorcycle sound recordings are seen as the holy grail of motorsport sound engineers simply because it is so hard to get the sound recorded right due to the limited amount of mounting points for the microphones, as well as due to the amount of wind to which they are subjected.

With thanks to Mark Knight, Chris Jojo, Jan Klein (Yamaha R6 driver) and Jannes Kerkvliet (Goedhart Motoren, suppliers of the Ducati).

‍