[LAU] Best recording practise

John Anderson ardour at semiosix.com
Tue Oct 9 10:51:08 EDT 2007


On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 15:44 +0200, Julien Claassen wrote:
> Hi John!
>   I want to record voice only. It's mostly spoken word and sometimes a bit of 
> singing. But not in one, those are seperate tasks. Btw. my microphone is a 
> simple middle-class live-mic.

I'm far from an expert on this. Anyway, here goes...

If you feel like spending a little money, SE Electronics makes a thing
which goes around the back of the mic and apparently absorbs some of the
reflected sound.

http://www.seelectronics.com/rf.html

If you don't want to spend money, I'd face towards the windows (open if
possible), not at the center of the room, but not too near the walls.
Definitely not in the corners. With voice you shouldn't have too much of
a problem with bass, but if you're finding the recording is very boomy,
you could try moving the mic position around.

The wooden ceiling and the carpet will probably absorb a fair amount of
the reflections. The other thing you can do is pack bookcases with
random spaced and different sized gaps, to diffuse reflections, same for
furniture and suchlike. Asymmetrical rooms produce less unpleasant
reverb than symmetrical rooms. A soft couch in there can't hurt.

I've heard that the draped sleeping bag / duvet trick does work to some
extent, never tried it myself though. Hang them away from the walls -
they do a better job of absorbing longer wavelength (bass) frequencies
that way. But you also need to be careful that you don't end up with
lots of high frequency attenuation and too much mid to low frequency in
the recording.

bye
John





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