Accessories
No matter what recorder you choose, your equipment is only as good as
the microphone you connect to it. The best kind of microphone depends
on the situation in which you are recording - there is no universal
mic for all settings. That said, you would probably do better with a
directional mic (not an omnidirectional one!), as it will help to eliminate
environmental sounds, like wind or crowd noise. They also tend to be
hardier than other kinds of microphones. It should be noted that recording
good dialect samples requires more than just shoving a microphone in
someone's face. Gillian Lane-Plescia uses a "lapel" mic, and instead
of clipping it on someone's jacket, just places it on the table in front
of them. Lapel mics can be great, but they also pick up body noise,
like scratching of whiskers and the rustle of clothing. |
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You
will also need headphones. I recommend the cheaper, lightweight kind
that come with most portable tape players, as they allow you to hear
both the recording and what is going on around you. However, if you
want to hear the real quality of your digital recording, you will need
the kind of headphones that fully cover your ears, often called "studio"
headphones, to block out the sound around you.
Gillian's
experience also suggests the use of rechargeable batteries:
"On
my recent trip to Ireland, I took my MiniDisc recorder, with a Sony
tie-pin mike, and my little Sony monaural TCM 59V, which has an excellent
built in mike. The only problem with the MD recorder is that it uses
enormous amounts of battery power, and romps through batteries at a
great rate, sometimes dying in the middle of a taping, which can slip
one's notice if one is not watching the display. I use the wall plug
when I can, but it's not always feasible. The quality of the recordings
is excellent. Even if I just set the little [lapel] mike on the table
in front of the speaker, it still picks up very well. It is quite a
delicate instrument so has to be handled carefully"
Her use of
a "backup" analog recorder is an important idea: even if the quality
is not quite as good, having any recording is better than none at all.
If something happens to your recorder in mid session, you have the audio
cassette to help fill in the blanks. She also mentioned that the built-in
microphone of her inexpensive and more robust analog unit makes it convenient
for quickly whipping out when she meets someone she would like to record.
Setting up a microphone and checking levels with headphones, as one
must with a sophisticated digital recorder, can be a real chore and
can put off your sample donor. "I have made some excellent recordings
with it in my pocket; recordings of conversations that would have ground
to a halt if the Tape Recorder had been produced!"
- Introduction
- MiniDisc
vs. DAT: Which is best for us?
- Accessories
- Editing,
CDs & TechTalk Recommendations
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