Some time has passed since I last posted here. Creativity comes on me in waves, when I am stressed it abandons me – that is living a life.
I have been looking for a SIMPLE way of capturing performance. I have a DAW, but that requires me to cart my laptop to the place all the music gear is and… sometimes that is not easy. Sadly, my old MiniDisk recorder is clunky – it now skips and jitters on long recordings and hates ANY sort of vibration while recording. Getting recordings off the recorder requires me to re-record in something like Audacity, which is also inconvenient.
I have discovered a performance style I really like – it is a “sort of” overdubbing approach. Let me explain.
I like to layer audio – this requires me to be able to capture an initial performance, and then add another on top of it, and so on. Up until now I have been using my Ditto+ looping pedal – the down-side of this is that the recording is MONO – I learned that guitar pedals are all MONOphonic – necessitating my to clone the channel to the other channel to give the illusion of stereo – not ideal.
I also loooooove starting with a field recording (some spatial/stereo audio I have captured from the real world) like a storm, seascape, walk in the woods or whatever. I have a Sony stereo microphone that works pretty well, but batteries, cables and a thumping sound generated by just holding it makes that solution clunky.
I agonised (like literally for a year) about portable field recorders. The Zoom product range had some exceptional spec’d gear and, because of cookies and browser history (I guess), a “special” appeared in my DMs for the Zoom H1n – a discount bundle that was waaaaay cheaper than I had seen before, so I jumped on it (fully expecting it to be a scam – I have been burned with scam purchases before … leather alien face hugger mask for one).
It arrived, along with a multi-pack of mini SD cards (32Gb cards cost nearly nothing – how did that happen), along with an accessory pack (case, power pack, mike pop shield). In nearly no time (like, literally 10 minutes) I was using it, and I understood the feature set – sooo cool that someone can design a product that just works, and the internal GUI is intuitive. One SD card gives me a week of recording time at the highest sample rate WAV – the crossover microphones capture spatial sound deliciously – I just love it. I also love the “overdub” feature that allows me to layer performances – it creates NEW files of the newly combined layers – so easy.
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