When you are in a nice place, you often hear sounds you want to record. Only to find that you have just a cellphone with you. Those recordings usually don’t cut it. The Ovens near LaHave in Nova Scotia is such a place.
Except that I did come prepared with a Zoom H3 and my two Behringer C-2s.
It’s easy to think that any microphone will do and that they are all the same. After all, it’s “only” field recording, right? Well, I tried with some cheap (ultra cheap) lav mics from Amazon, only to find that their noise level was in the –30dB… Useless for some more delicate recordings.
So I brought my Behringer C-2s. They are a bit “crispy”, but have a good sound. Even more at their price point. For less than 100 CAD, they do a great job. But they don’t like humidity. After a while, one of them started popping and crackling. A bit of troubleshooting pointed at one of the Behringers. Since I was recording with a new F3, I had no idea where the noise was coming from or even if it was recorded at all. Well, it came from the mic and it was recorded.
Once back home, I left them out in the air and they “dried up”; no more crackling.
The early morning is a great time to record all kinds of sounds that we don’t hear later in the day. So when I was camping at The Ovens, I decided to get up early and do some recording. Getting up was easy, the temps in the tent were already soaring towards +27C at 5 AM…
Once I found a good-sounding spot, I set up the gear and walked away to start recording. Since I am using a small Bluetooth device for my headphones I can walk away further from the recorder. I was a few meters away when I heard the mosquito near my head and started swatting it. Only to realize that it was checking out the mics instead of my head 
.
They did find me a few minutes later and I had to flee further away.
The low rumbling sound you can hear is the sea, a mere 100 meters away from where I was standing.
Until next time…