Championship Baseball Crowds

We had a rare opportunity to record baseball crowds with a full access media pass for what turned out to be a deep playoff run.

The recording setup was a very unique quad rig that had Microtech Gefell M930 large diaphragm condensers in the front and either small diaphragm condensers or PZM mics in the rears.

The huge crowd experienced every emotion over the several games that were recorded.  The home team got blown out of a game, they came back and won a game in dramatic fashion, and then dominated a game from start to finish.  Players made huge defensive plays, hit massive home runs, and even got ejected from the game. Some games the roof was open, and others it was closed, which altered the sound quite a bit.

After the series ended we went through the painstaking task of sorting through and editing dozens of hours of recordings.

We separated clips into broad groups of cheers, boos, idles, callouts, chants, and other reactions.  Then we drilled in deeper to sort each group by intensity and to continue to prune out any elements that didn’t belong.

We removed copyrighted music, team specific chants, annoying people, audio blemishes, and anything else that stood out in an unpleasant way.

This is a perfect library for film, TV and game work that needs big stadium crowds.