outdoor recording

amarach

amarach

New member
has anyone had some experience with recording outdoors? we're planning on recording 4 people in a wood. we don't mind picking up some ambient sounds as well whether we record them simultaneously with the music or separately. Instruments will be guitars, small percussion (shakers, woodblocks), violin and lots of voices.
we'll probably record onto minidiscs but would like some advice about mics and placement and pretty much any other useful tips anyone can give us!
 
Do you plan on recording them in stereo with two mics or miking each instrument/vocal with individual mics (or maybe both)? Also, remember by design minidisc is compressed.
 
amarach said:
has anyone had some experience with recording outdoors? we're planning on recording 4 people in a wood. we don't mind picking up some ambient sounds as well whether we record them simultaneously with the music or separately. Instruments will be guitars, small percussion (shakers, woodblocks), violin and lots of voices.
we'll probably record onto minidiscs but would like some advice about mics and placement and pretty much any other useful tips anyone can give us!
Click to expand...

An mbeidh aonach amárach?

Mini disks suck for recording you should try to borrow a digital recorder of some kind. Where abouts are you? I could maybe bring some mics if your nearby in ireland.
 
ok thanks guys
this is my plan
6/7 mics
one on each person
and 2 overhead
maybe one in distance

ok the mics are fine
but as you said minidisc is bad for recording what sort of digital recorder could help?
as i said we'll be in a forest so power will be a problem
 
amarach said:
ok thanks guys
this is my plan
6/7 mics
one on each person
and 2 overhead
maybe one in distance

ok the mics are fine
but as you said minidisc is bad for recording what sort of digital recorder could help?
as i said we'll be in a forest so power will be a problem
Click to expand...
Multi-track or two-track?... and when you say "as i said we'll be in a forest so power will be a problem" does than mean it must all be battery powered... or will some AC pwr be available?

Maybe something like the Marantz CDR300 (two-track) http://www.8thstreet.com/product.asp?ProductCode=11820&Category=Recorders or Fostex MR8 (8-trk, but only two at a time) http://www.8thstreet.com/product.asp?ProductCode=8530&Category=Recorders (both are battery powered) of course you'd still need a battery powered mixer and pre-mix if you want to use 6-7 mics.
 
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Let me see if I have this correct... you need a battery powered digital recorder that can record at least 8-tracks simultaneously?
 
You could get a DC/AC inverter and that would take care of the power problem. It gives you 120V AC from a car battery.
 
I ran my fostex VF160 off a UPS for a short time and recorded 8 tracks.
The UPS gave me around 40 min of record time.
 
amarach, how much recording time do you need? Comments on the Car battery/inverter and UPS ideas?
 
it's hard to say how much time we'll need. ideally three hours at least. we'd considered the generator notion before but wouldn't it make too much noise? we're going for sylvan rather than industrial! we will be in the middle of nowhere and we'll be walking there so weight is a consideration. we're not that concerned with the "quality" of the recording as we'll be fooling with it in cakewalk anyway. what we want to get is the basics we have nothing against overdubbing later.
is there anyway to boost the signal going into a minidisc? at the moment we're thinking of micing some areas in stereo and then going by instrument and indivdual, case by case. we'll be giving it a trial run in the next few days (if it stops raining) so we'll let you know how it goes.
any further thoughts are more than welcome.

btw thanks for the offer paddy! we should be fine for mics. we're in co. wicklow and the others are from tallaght. between us we've way more than we can carry!
 
Well, to be honest... at this point I'm not sure what to recommend. You're kind of between a rock and a hard spot at this point. Maybe record with a labtop and call it good. Out of curiosity, what mics will you be using?
 
at the moment we have an ev n/d 267, a shure 58 (in the post!) and a shure 57 on loan. i don't know what the other guys are bringing but probably similar cardioid vocal mics. we could get a laptop alright if you think it'd work. we're prepared to improvise!!!
 
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