Best companion mic for a Zoom H4N?

[Fran Guidry]

Originally Posted by justonwo

Ok, I've got it. Yeah, those tracks above are just an attempt to fix bad recordings since I haven't had time to try these tricks you have mentioned. I will definitely try playing around with mic placement and lower levels. Perhaps that will help to mitigate picking noise as well.

Just so I'm clear, is "normalizing" the standard process for bringing the level up when you're finally done, or is some other technique used for that?

As Doug explains, normalization is nothing more than adding digital gain. It's often the case that simple peak normalization will not give us the level we like in our "mastered" release version, and additional tricks will be needed.

If you visually inspect your file you'll probably see a few peaks in the waveform that are far above the rest. The highest peak will set the limit for normalization or manual gain adjustment, so one trick is to manually reduce those peaks. If even more "loudness" is desired a brickwall limiter might be used.

Fran

[Fran Guidry]

Originally Posted by justonwo

Thank so much for helping through some of the basics. Getting "permission" to move the mic around is a big help, I think.

I guess the question is, how much should I expect the sound quality to improve if I get, say, a couple of Peluso CEMC6 mics to try different techniques. Is it a significant improvement or relatively modest? Worth the investment or should I focus on the H4n mics?

This is a really interesting decision point. Doug does a nice job of presenting the issues, and I think the ability to experiment with mic placement is worth something, goodness knows I've spent hours fiddling with mics.

But the time spent playing with mics is time _not_ spent improving one's playing, arranging, and composing, and those are the real limits to the quality of the recording, once a minimum level of gear and technical knowledge is in play.

I can offer something of a comparison between the H4n internal mics and a fairly expensive external mic: http://www.homebrewedmusic.com/2009/...-the-zoom-h4n/

I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't do a same source level matched comparison between the internals and externals, but perhaps there's enough information in those samples to help you decide about spending on new mics.

Fran

[justonwo]

Good point, Fran, about focusing on performance. That's really where the vast majority of my time goes. I'm not looking to get crazy about recording. I just want to know enough to produce a reasonable recording. My playing really isn't at the level yet where a lot of time focused on recording would pay off. The advice you all have given here is great. Thanks very much.