Grateful Dead Music Forum

As a favour for a friend I've been recording a local jazz band in small bars with a Zoom H2. It works ok. Now I also need to record a senior's choir -- again just a favour, nothing fancy -- and I thought I'd take the opportunity to fire up my Portastudio 8-track and do a semi-proper recording.

So now I need some semi-proper microphones. I've been googling, but man microphones are complicated. I know there are folks here who recorded GD shows under comparable conditions. Anybody have a recommendation for a pair of mics that might do the job? The Portastudio has Phantom Power and XLR jacks, I believe.

Thanks!

I hung out in the taper section for many years. For the most part, the mics used weren't cheap. There were a few people who had highly modified cheap radio shack mics but I have no idea what their recordings sounded like.

I started out with a pair of Nakamichi CM-300 microphones with shotguns. I think they ran me $300 for the pair back in the 80's. You can get them on EBay for maybe $100 each. I quickly moved on to a pair of Sennheiser MD 421 for about $600 a pair. Later I simply searched for a patch out of anyone using Schoeps as I wasn't going to lay out the couple grand needed to go into that realm.

Not sure it is possible to do a matrix with the zoom and the portastudio and use whatever mics you can scrape up. Otherwise, you might be able to synchronize two digital recordings if you do an alignment click at the beginning and end.

The newer multi-track zoom has built in mics and you can also plug in a pair of external microphones. You get the best of both worlds with this setup.

Regardless, I have made some really nice recordings using the Zoom internal mics and it is all about mic placement..

Thanks Dan. You weren't kidding about cost. There's a pair of Nakamichi CM-300s on the Bay now and they're still $300! (CDN with shipping etc).

I tried the synchronization trick with a pair of H2s and with an H2 and a Moebius. I have no idea why, but the tracks were all at slightly different speeds. Even the two H2s, which looked identical, had a tiny difference that made the tracks move noticeably out of sync after 30 minutes or so. Weird.

The problem with this particular bar is that the KB monitors are on the ceiling and in front of the stage. The stage is maybe 10' x 10' and there's a giant glass window right behind the drummer. Here's a pic:



It's an acoustic nightmare. But one thing I haven't tried is to hang the Zoom from the ceiling pointing down. There's a light fixture in front of the stage that might just do the trick.

The internal word clocks in both those devices are off. That's normal. You were probably getting pretty bad comb filtering from the out of synch as well, that phase'd different freq's as the mixed recording progressed. Also, any two mics in one room, not properly set up will give you phase issues..

Sure, you could take just one mono recording, double it, pan it hard, and nudge one of the tracks to get a bigger stereo sound effect, still with minor comb filtering, but I think there's a way better solution.. I know you want to tape, but digital is pretty hard to beat these days for this type of recording..

Someone's in the bands gotta have an iPhone.. Get a Rode iXY ( $120 on Amazon right now). It's has onboard A/D conversion. 24bit /96k.. It's a stereo mic, already aligned..

You can email/text message the entire show to all the band members at the end of the night.. Listen to it on the car ride home..No fussing..

My 2

The Portastudio is actually digital; it records to SD. I got it because it looks and acts like my beloved original Portastudio, with it's glorious all-ceramic cassette that never let me down.

But you're right about the iPhone. I dislike Apple products, but it's pretty hard to argue with that kind of usability.

If you haven't already, you might want to surf on over to www.taperssection.com - it's a forum, just like this one, dedicated to taping. They have a "yard sale" section, where people buy/sell all sorts of equipment, from mics, to preamps, and on and on. Might be worth reviewing the forum there to get an idea of what would work best (also, you can learn about mic technique, and varied anglings/spacings - XY, ORTF, DIN, DINa, NOS.

You might want to consider these http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=171726.0 - ask the seller about them and whether they'd work for your purposes. I used to surf that forum pretty often, and my impression was that he was one of the most knowledgeable people on the board - a definite resource.