Ralph Schaafsma

So a while ago I touched the topic of recording audio for MJUKS. Today I want to some more about recording in the field as well as in studio conditions.

As I mentioned in my previous post I took a chance and recorded the Noisia interview with a condenser mic instead of a dynamic mic. The reason I chose to do this is because interviewees usually suck at holding a microphone at a good and stable distance. The idea was to have a dynamic conversation between two people + interviewer, and having one dynamic microphone (or maximum of two) going between the three of them is really impairing the dynamics of the conversation.

So that’s where the condenser microphone came in, taking the possibility of background noise that a dynamic microphone would not pick up in considerations plus the potential gain from having a more lively conversation I decided to go for the condenser mic. And as it turned out it was a sound decision. The music playing in the background was not overly present and by the music added to the interview it was virtually impossible to hear.

Select Noisia to see the interview

Another topic I’d like to discuss is the sometimes obvious overdubbing of audio. Sometimes people don’t seem to realize that recording something in a studio sounds a lot different from in the field. Not so much having background noise that isn’t present in a studio recording but the fact that a voice sounds a lot different recorded from 2 feet away from say 10 feet with a boom mic. One example where that is present is the item called Urban Fierljeppen, way at the end when the guy (my voice) starts cussing the voice sounds out of place somewhat. Luckily the guys who made it did a good job of letting it sound less studio recorded, too bad that they left out some backgroundnoise at the end which would’ve made the ‘transformation’ complete.

The reason why it sounds good is because there aren’t any other voices in the item to compare it to. For example in some episodes where the voice over (me) ask interviewees questions it’s obvious that it was not recorded on the scene.

A way to counter this is to listen to the scene audio and determine which frequencies are less apparent from the studio recording. Removing bass is an easy way to make something sound more ‘real’. Another thing that is very hard to fix are mouth sounds that you only pick up when recording from very close up. Luckily we don’t have that problem with our items but sometimes people record sound for example tutorials with the microphone basically inside of their mouth creating these mouth sounds that would make you want to throw up. It sounds unprofessional for it sounds like you try to eliminate background noise by putting the microphone very close to your mouth.

My advice? Get a better microphone, or just leave the background noise in. Noise is not distracting then say a baby screaming in the background. Also I’d rather have a low white noise then your voice sounding like it’s underwater from all those nice noise remover artifacts.

One other thing I’ve noticed when listening to podcasts, everyone seems to think that voices need mono 98kb/s + and 44khz. This is about twice the bandwidth you need to bring out a podcast. I export mine on mono 48kb/s on 22khz and the difference between 98 is not really noticeable, unless you take something like music into account. To be honest I really hate when I need to leave home in 5 minutes and I want to have a podcast to listen to that I have to download about twice the size that it really needs.