Field recording can be done in the weirdest places, from high mountains to cities. Some 15 years ago, I was in my hometown of Leeuwarden, Netherlands. As usual, there was a street market, although not in the usual place at that time. The space was stretched out and really cramped as they still allowed regular traffic to go through.
Back then, I only had my Zoom H2, a brand-new, wonderful Handy recorder.
Far from me were the ideas of “self noise” or even “gain staging”. No, that time was more like “switch it on, press the button and record”. The results were more often than not in the realm of garbageable recordings, but I still kept many of them. Just like in photography, I couldn’t be sure that some future software function wouldn’t be able to help the recording sound better.
Today, with software like Reaper, Audacity or RX and their armies of plugins for better sound came to the rescue. The original recording had an abundance of the snare drum, but the rest was kind of drowned out. A little EQ and a compressor managed to make this sound a lot better without ruining everything.
Have a listen:
The lead picture is the actual band playing at that time.
Until next time…