About field recordings (2)

After my adventures in the pre-digital era described here came a long hiatus so that when I returned to field-recordings the digital time had arrived (for a while, really). The advantages of digital recordings are numerous and easily outrun the advantages of analogue equipment when it comes to field-recordings. It is light, small, easy to handle, has not mechanical parts that can break down (provided you work with flash memories rather than discs). It is durable, gets you a lot of mileage out of batteries and shows little wear. So, with little money to spend, I bought the Olympus VN-480. It costs an enormous 110 Euros quite a few years back. Below you can see what it got you that time:

Lovely VN-480

It is extremely easy to operate. Just put two AAA-batteries in the back and you are ready to go and record all those sounds.

Truth be told: it was awful. As in: really awful. Oh yes, it was light and small and all that but the best it could manage was 22050Hz, 88kbps, 4 bit, mono. (just) Good enough to dictate a letter to your secretary but that is where it stops. Anything it recorded sounded plastic, with an overemphasis on mids and highs and total absence of low. It also made a lot of noise by itself and had the tendency to add distortion to any complex sound that was recorded.

Nevertheless, it was useful for me as I learned how to deal with digital recordings (especially when it came to polishing sounds back at home). And I did most of the field-recordings on 8pmcityscapes using this cheap machine. For example in this recording that I made in London and that features prominently in the song ‘Streetpreacher’. The distortion actually adds something to the recording. Still, the Olympus is now gathering dust as I found a replacement. More about that later.

About field recordings 1

8pmcityscapes features many field recordings. Sometimes they can be heard quite clearly, sometimes they are more hidden in the mix. Either way, field-recordings are an important part of my work so I decided to give it some attention here in a few posts. In this first installment: how it all started.

It started back in the olden days, in the pre-digital era, with the Tascam Porta One. This is actually a four-track recording and pretty bulky so it is far removed from the small digital recorders of today. But hey, it recorded well. All you had to do is stick a large number of large batteries in it and plug your favorite mikes at the rear panel. If I remember correctly, it was possible to record two tracks simultaneously so you could do stereo recordings. In the end I used this one mostly for recording demos instead of field recordings because it was too big to be of much fun outdoors. Also, people started asking questions when they saw me using this outside. Nothing ruins a good recording more than people going “what is it that you are doing there?”. Here is a picture of the beast. Well-preserved but I doubt I will use it again any time in the future.