Soviet SU-76 Recording
In May 2018 three of us from Pole, Mats, Niklas and Robin took off on a recording trip to Poland. In the sunny countryside outside the town of Łódź lies the Apogeum Film Museum, which is a family owned company that has preserved hundreds of old historical vehicles which are often used for e.g. film and television. We had been invited by renowned recordist Michal Fojcik and together with him and his team we recorded 12 vehicles in 3 days. Among them where the Polonez 1500 police car, a 1943 Volkswagen Kübelwagen, a beautiful 1939 Opel Blitz, a 1936 Tankietka mini tank and an old grumpy russian SU-76 tank from 1943 that is featured in Pole’s October release.
It is an understatement to say that the rigging process of the SU-76 was challenging. To get the mics positioned where we wanted in the engine bay, we had to crawl in extremely tight and narrow spaces. And in addition to that the tank floor was filled with an inch deep lovely mixture of water, oil and diesel.
Mats, who was monitoring the onboard recorders during the session, sat in a nice misty spray of diesel mixed with cooling water that came from an engine leakage right by his position. When he finally got out he was more or less soaked in it. He was also just a few seconds from losing his right hand fingers from an armored hatch that suddenly, during the driving on the course, slammed shut right where he moments earlier had taken a grip to keep his balance!
All in all though, the recording session was very successful and after three days we arrived home with 12 really good recordings of some very unusual and hard to get vehicles.
We’d like to send huge thanks to Michal Fojcik, Ran Jey and Bartłomiej Bogacki for making us feel at home in Poland and without whom the recordings wouldn’t have turned out as great as they did. Also thanks to the local fire department for blocking the road for us to avoid through-traffic on the road that we used for driving. And of course, last but not least, tons of gratitude goes to Jacek Kopczyński and his family at the Apogeum Film Museum for their dedication and work with preserving these old vehicles for future generations.
All the vehicles from the session can be found in our Sound Shop!
