I’ve spent a good portion of my career recording loud sounds: weapons, explosions, fireworks, and just about anything else that makes you question whether you set your gain correctly.
And I have to admit, I really enjoy it.
There’s always a challenge involved. How do you get the biggest, most interesting sound possible with the equipment you have? Where should the microphones go? How much level can you get away with? And, maybe most importantly, what is the environment doing to the
sound?
Someone recently asked me about recording fireworks, and it got me thinking that they’re actually a great place to start if you’re interested in eventually recording weapons or explosions.
Why Fireworks?
I live in Duvall, Washington, where fireworks are a pretty regular occurrence around the 4th of July and New Year’s. My neighbors buy all kinds of enormous fireworks and spend the evening firing them off in front of their houses.
For me, that means free recording practice.
I particularly like fireworks because they give you an opportunity to practice recording the kind of sharp transients and long environmental tails you encounter with weapons. In an urban or suburban environment, it can be really interesting to hear how those sounds travel through a neighborhood, bounce between buildings, and reflect off concrete and other hard surfaces.
That experience has been genuinely useful for me professionally when recording weapon tails.
And unlike an organized weapons recording session, where time and access can be limited, fireworks give you an opportunity to experiment. If one setup doesn't work, move the microphones and try something different on the next shot.
Don't Bring Every Microphone You Own
The first thing I think about is how much equipment I can realistically manage.
When I'm recording fireworks in my neighborhood from my house, I have the luxury of running more rigs because I can easily monitor them and move things around. If I'm heading somewhere else, I try to keep things much simpler.
For something like an urban fireworks recording, I might bring three or four rigs:
A Wildtronics SAAM going into a Roland R-07
A Schoeps M/S rig using a CMIT and CCM 4
A spaced stereo pair of Uši Pros
A shotgun such as a Sennheiser MKH 8070
That probably sounds like a lot, but I've found that's about what I can comfortably manage in the field.
If you're starting out, I'd go simpler. Two rigs can give you a tremendous amount of useful material. Three can work well if one of them is a handheld recorder like a Sony D100, Zoom M4, or Zoom H2E.
The important thing isn't how many microphones you have. It's whether each one is giving you something useful.
Don't Record the Same Thing Four Times
This is probably the biggest thing I'd emphasize.
If I'm running several rigs, I don't want four slightly different versions of exactly the same perspective.
I want different perspectives.
Spread the rigs out when it's practical and safe. Point them in different directions. Let one concentrate on the direct report while another listens toward a building or other reflective surface. Put another somewhere that emphasizes the distant tail.
A microphone doesn't necessarily need to be pointed directly at the source.
Sometimes the interesting sound is happening behind you.
That becomes particularly important when you're recording weapons. The direct shot is only one component of what makes a gunshot sound large. The environment reacting to that shot can be just as important.
So instead of relying entirely on the different character of your microphones to create variety, use the environment to create variety.
Listen Before You Start Placing Microphones
When I get to a location, I like to listen to the first few fireworks before making too many decisions.
Where does the sound travel?
What does it bounce off?
Is there a building producing an interesting slap?
Is there a long tail coming back from somewhere else?
Are there surfaces or structures producing something completely unexpected?
Then I'll adjust microphone positions based on what I'm hearing.
If there's a great reflection coming off a building, I'll happily point a microphone off-axis from the actual fireworks to capture it. That microphone isn't there to give me another direct perspective. Its job is to capture the environment.
This is one of those things that becomes easier the more you do it. You start listening to spaces differently.
Gain Staging Loud Sounds
Gain staging extremely loud sources deserves its own discussion because it's very easy to get wrong.
My general philosophy is that I don't want to record unnecessarily low just because I'm afraid of seeing a red light on my meter.
If the recording is extremely conservative, those sharp transients can sometimes end up feeling smaller and less aggressive than I wanted. You can certainly process them later, but I've generally preferred getting a healthy, usable signal in the field rather than assuming I'll create all of that impact and umph afterward.
At the same time, 32-bit float does not guarantee a perfect recording.
It can give you considerably more flexibility at the recorder stage, but the microphone capsule and analog electronics ahead of the converter still have limits. A sufficiently loud transient can overload something before 32-bit float ever has a chance to help you.
That's an important distinction with fireworks, weapons, and explosions.
So listen as much as you look at the meters. If something sounds crunchy or slammed, don't assume it's recoverable just because you're recording 32-bit float.
Give yourself headroom, learn the limits of your equipment, and experiment.
Distance Is Part of the Sound
With fireworks, the closest position isn't automatically the best position.
In fact, one of the reasons I like recording them in urban environments is the opportunity to capture everything happening around the initial explosion.
Get far enough away and individual fireworks can start producing fantastic distant reports, reflections, and long tails. Over an entire evening, those recordings can turn into dense, warfare-like ambiences that can be extremely useful when working in games.
You can also take particularly clean individual reports and work with them more tightly to use as transients for weapon sounds.
The point is to think beyond "I am recording a firework."
You're recording: the transient + the distance + the environment + the reflections + the tail.
All of those things contribute to what you eventually hear.
Location Matters for Another Reason
There's also a practical side to all of this.
If you're recording a public fireworks event or wandering around a city late at night, remember that you're carrying expensive equipment into an environment where people may be drinking, partying, and generally not paying much attention to the person standing beside a few thousand dollars' worth of microphones.
I've never had a serious issue with this, but I plan around the possibility.
Don't build a setup that takes forever to tear down.
I like rigs that I can grab, disconnect, and get out with quickly if I need to. Ideally, I want to be able to pack everything in roughly five minutes.
That means packing light and, more importantly, practicing your setup before the recording day.
A night or two beforehand, build the rigs. Tear them down. Pack the bag. Set them up again.
Figure out which cables you actually need.
Figure out what can stay assembled.
Figure out what you thought you needed but really don't.
When the fireworks start, you should be thinking about sound, not trying to remember which adapter is buried at the bottom of your bag.
The Bigger Lesson
The biggest reason I recommend recording fireworks isn't necessarily because everyone needs a giant fireworks library.
It's because they're great practice.
They force you to deal with extreme transients, huge dynamic changes, microphone overload, gain staging, distance, reflections, environmental tails, multiple rigs, and unpredictable timing.
Those are many of the same problems you'll encounter when you eventually step onto a weapons or explosives recording session.
And every time you go out, try something different.
Move a microphone farther away. Point one backward. Listen for a reflection that initially seems useless. Bring one weird microphone you wouldn't normally choose.
You will inevitably make some bad recordings.
That's part of it.
But occasionally you'll put a microphone somewhere you didn't expect to work, listen back afterward, and realize that's the perspective that made the entire recording session worthwhile.
And that's a big part of what makes recording loud sounds so much fun.
Here is a look at some of the fireworks I have captured over the years:
July 4th, 2025
December 31st, 2025
July 4th, 2025
July 4th, 2024
July 4th, 2023
July 4th, 2022 (Caption in the vid is incorrect)
July 4th, 2018
