Ralph Schaafsma

This weekend we had an interview with the awesome guys from Noisia**. Too bad we again encountered problems with the audio equipment. This time the condenser-microphone was basically giving a brief burst of static every once in a while for an unknown reason. Luckily that hardly happened when something important was said but still it’s a mayor pain in the ass.

This time around I decided to use the condenser mic for an interview instead of a dynamic one. Having the people who are being interviewed hold the microphone themselves just looks silly and you’re never going to get consistent audio quality from that. A risk I took was to use the condenser mic for the interview with semi-blocked music in the background. For it is great that the camera gives an audio signal output which is so low you can hardly hear anything. How am I supposed to check if the audio is good if I can’t even hear it, all them levels are jiggling fine but I can hardly check it. So we’re going to see if the audio is good enough, as far as I could hear it sounded fine also the volume was way more consistent than if we were to use a dynamic microphone. If you’re not the guy asking the questions you cannot correct the way the microphone is being held. Let alone if the interviewed need to hold it themselves.

So yes, I took a risk and we’ll see how it plays out. I’m just annoyed by the sheer amount of malfunctioning hardware we got. Soon I’m gonna see what the fieldmixer is like they say school has, I’m not thinking it has a limiter but it might give me a controlroom (aka my headset) signal boost.

For those not in the know, a limiter(/compressor) is a device (or part of a device) which checks if a signal is not passing a certain threshold. If that happens it dims that signal to the maximum allowed and then sends it on to whatever recording equipment you’re using, leaving a good non distorted signal. I’m not sure if the mixing table in the big studio at school has one build in but why should it? -It’s a controlled environment where the guy in charge should set things right. If it’s a ‘in the field interview’ then it’s a whole different deal.

On another note I’m thinking of using my own microphone. I’ve got an omni condenser that might be better to use for interviews like this but then again we’ll have to see if using a condenser all together is good enough to do the job. Or look into getting school to buy some small pin-on microphones which they use a lot on talk shows and the likes. That would make our job a lot easier not to mention to make it look more professional.

Another thing I’ve taken myself to do is try and help with the audio editing for the final product, the episode. I’d like to be there when the voice-overs are being recorded and give pointers here and there. Plus I’d like to do some recording all together in the big studio which a small group of us recently got access to. I might bring my own equipment and see how it handles itself to it’s more expensive counterparts.

**Noisia:
Noisia is a group of complete mentals making drum and bass music. We knew they were that way so we made our interview in such a way that we used that to bring out their true nature and show them as crazy as they are. Personally I haven’t been into drum and bass that much but after being to their show I do see potential, there were some awesome songs!