Introducing Vintage Combine, my latest sound effects library, featuring high-quality stereo sounds of a fully operational 1970s-era John Deere 4400 combine harvester. I found a willing farmer in his late 70s harvesting a small corn crop at his family farm in northeast Ohio. His combine was set up with a four-row corn head. It looks like a set of hair clippers, only much bigger.
I made the recordings on a beautiful October afternoon. Placing a Sony PCM D100 inside the combine’s cab, I captured door slams, idling and harvesting sounds. The farmer was a real trooper and refrained from making noise during the recording.
Several exterior sounds include a pass-by, idling and throttling at different RPMs. Plus, there is an exterior onboard recording of the machine harvesting the field. It travels slowly up and down rows of tall, dried-out field corn. I used a boom pole to suspend a pair of Line Audio CM3 microphones, in ORTF, over the moving harvester corn head.
Dry cornstalks sound fantastic as they are chewed up and spit out into the combine’s grain tank. Seamless loops of select sounds are included as well.
Back in its day, a four-row combine would have been all the average farmer ever needed. This machine sold well in its 9-year production run. But times have changed. Mega farms have gobbled up small farms. And 50-year-old farm machinery, like this combine, can’t keep up.
This ’70s harvester is a nostalgic piece of farm machinery that needed to be preserved, through sound. For your next farm feature, consider using Vintage Combine.
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Library Specs
- 9 sounds captured at 96kHz/24bit, 27 minutes, 908 MB
- Sound Devices 702 with Line Audio CM3’s in ORTF and Sony PCM D100
- Metadata via Soundly and BWF
- UCS compliant
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Behind the Scenes
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