Recording Speech With a Portable Recorder

Portable
recording devices—sometimes called field recorders—have enjoyed something of
a boom in production in recent years, with many manufacturers trying to outdo
each other to produce the most feature-laden products at a competitive price. 

The reason that you’d want to own one depends on what you plan to do with
it, but anyone planning to record a concert, an interview, a song demo, a
lecture or meeting, or some ambience or suitable background noise for a short film
clip should definitely consider owning one. 

Modern recording devices are
so lightweight and pocket-sized portable that you can easily go to the sound
source; it doesn’t have to come to you.

Must-Have Features

Nearly
all field recorders are battery-powered, carry their own built-in microphones, and can record in stereo at a variety of sample rates. These days they
typically store data on CompactFlash, SD, or microSD cards, which can take
anywhere from 2GB to upwards of 16GB or 32GB, so there’s usually plenty of
storage room in case you need to run one for hours at a time to record that
unmissable live event. 

For uncompressed CD quality wavs, you can store as much
as six hours of audio on a 4GB card, but if you choose to record at mp3
quality, this can extend to over 60 hours! Here’s a picture of one of the most
popular field recorders currently around, the Zoom H4n:

The Zoom built-in microphones can be set to a 90-degree or 120-degree angle for optimal stereo
recording. At the side there is a headphone input, as well as record volume and
volume control so that you can monitor what is being recorded. Level meters give
balance and saturation information, and the transport controls are
simplicity itself. 

You can play back recordings through headphones or through
a built-in mono speaker, though the latter is quite poor quality but good enough for a general
overview. Files are stored with file numbers or by date. They can be renamed, but
it is a bit fiddly to do, and they can be transferred to a computer or laptop later
by means of a USB cable. 

When you connect the handheld recorder to a computer,
it simply becomes an additional external hard drive, so files can be copied,
renamed, and edited on suitable audio editing software very easily. 

The Zoom
H4n can in fact do several other things as well; it can record as a four-track portable
recorder and even act as an audio interface. I haven’t used the four-track
capability myself, but it essentially means you could plug in some line level
instruments (like a keyboard) and record vocals through the built-in microphones
simultaneously, but to separate tracks for mixing later.

Internal vs External Microphones

When I bought my first field recorder some years ago—an
M?Audio Microtrack—my main concern was the microphone quality. The T-shaped
microphone that was supplied with the recorder seemed to be of only moderate
quality. For me, the only answer seemed to be to carry a pair of decent condenser
microphones and run these into the recorder via its own XLR inputs. 

There
remained the question of phantom power, that I solved that by buying first a
pair of AKG C1000s, and then later a pair of Rode NT3s; both these microphone
models can run on PP9 batteries stored in the barrel of the microphone. The
results were fine at the time, but there were significant concerns I remember;
notably that you had to charge up the recorder before use, with no real
indication of how long it would last before needing to be recharged.

Later, I bought a Zoom H4n. My reason for this choice initially was its
ability to take external microphones through its own XLR inputs. Soon after
beginning to use it, I began to question whether it was actually necessary to
carry additional microphones on location. 

The built-in microphones proved to be
of excellent quality and I have been very comfortable using them both for
speech, ambience and song demo recording. Here are a couple of things I have
noticed, however:

1. For interviews or
   recording ambience outdoors, it is likely that you will have to use the wind
   shield supplied with the unit, which is a soft foam cap that fits over both
   microphones. It does seem that the microphones pick up wind noise quite
   readily, so I found myself using the foam shield as a matter of course.

2. For song demos, high
   treble and speech sibilants come across with a great deal of clarity, which is
   highly encouraging, but I did find myself wondering if the recordings I made
   could use a little more warmth or body in the region of between 400Hz and 1000Hz. It proved easy to solve, however: after transferring the files to my
   laptop, I mastered them with a little tube compression using a plug-in that
   comes supplied with WaveLab 8.0. Initially I had thought a little equalization might
   be necessary as well, but in fact I was well satisfied with the results just
   using the tube compressor; the tracks sounded significantly fuller and well
   balanced without losing that treble clarity. I always feel there’s no point in
   adding extra layers of processing if they are not strictly needed.

Speech Recording and Interview Technique

Speech
recording is fairly straightforward to achieve with a field recorder, but
interviewing does require a little forethought and practice. 

For both speech
and interviews, the location is important. If you record indoors, the room
itself will have an impact on your recording because the microphones will pick
up sound reflected back off the walls. Consider how acoustically dry the chosen location is? Consider extraneous noise from the surrounding area,
and whether it will become a problem. If you are outdoors, room reverb isn’t an
issue but there’s almost bound to be background ambience of one kind or another… birds, town or city ambient noise. 

Background noise is fine and all part of
the on-location recording experience, provided it is fairly low level and
steady in volume, in which case it tends not to be much of a distraction. But
wind noise is a nuisance, as has been mentioned already. Use the windshield.

Here’s
an excerpt from a practice interview I organised while conducting a recording
training course in Africa recently. The location was outside and no wind shield
was used, so you’ll be able to hear wind interference quite soon after the
beginning—it becomes very apparent around 30 seconds in. Note also that the interviewer doesn’t sound very engaged or
encouraging—something else that ideally should be avoided.

It might be helpful to
practice your interview technique a couple of times before attempting the real
thing. As there are stereo microphones, you can obviously hold the recorder
sideways with one microphone pointing towards your interviewee and the other
back at yourself. 

At first I found it a bit tempting to move the microphones
backwards and forwards as each person speaks, but this isn’t a great idea as
there will certainly be awkward level changes that will take some editing to
iron out later, especially if there’s a high degree of interaction during the
interview. 

The best approach seems to be to try to hold the recorder very steady
throughout the interview, either at an equidistant point from each person or
slightly nearer the one with the quieter voice, if you can establish who that is ahead
of time. 

The resulting recording may still be a little louder on one channel,
but provided the levels remain reasonably constant throughout it’s a fairly
straightforward process to peak master the left and right channels separately so
that the end result sounds reasonably balanced. 

Here’s an excerpt of an interview I
conducted with a young singer in Africa; this mp3 has been slightly edited and
balanced a little better at the mastering stage as I didn’t quite get the
levels right first time:

Top Five Comparison

If you’ve yet to buy a
portable recorder, you might find the chart at the bottom of this article
useful. All of them provide USB connectivity and record to a high uncompressed
wav spec, but only some have a four-track capability as well as stereo. 

Note that
only two of them provide for external microphone inputs, and only the Zoom with
XLR inputs and phantom power; vital if you plan to use condenser microphones which don’t use
PP9 batteries. Most current models also ship with additional recording
software, some with Cubase LE, which can be useful.

I did think originally about
buying the Tascam DR-100, but in the end the competitive price, good reviews,
and connectivity of the Zoom H4n won me over. Happy recording.

Model	Edirol R-09HR	Zoom H4n	Tascam DR-100	Sony PCM-D50	Olympus LS-11
Recording channels	2	4	4	2	2
Multiple pickup patterns	No	Yes, 90/120/360		X-Y / Wide Stereo	No
Best WAV recording formats	24bit, 96KHz	24bit, 96KHz	24bit, 96KHz	24bit, 96KHz	24bit, 96KHz
Best MP3 recording formats	320kbps, 48KHz MP3	320kbps, 48KHz MP3	320kbps,  MP3	none	320kbps,  MP3
Mic setup, coincident pair, etc	side by side	coincident pair, X/Y	side by side	coincident pair, X/Y	side by side
Internal speaker	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes
External inputs	Mic / Line	Mic / Line / XLR x2 / Phono x 2	1/8th inch Mic / Line	1/8th inch Mic / Line	2x 3.5mm Mic / Line
Phantom power for external mic	No	Yes	No	No	No
USB connectivity	Yes, cable provided	Yes, cable provided	Yes	Yes	Yes
Integrated tuner / metronome	No	tuner / metronome	Yes	No	No
Software included	Cakewalk pyro, Audio Creator LE	Cubase LE	Cubase AI5	Cubase LE4	Cubase LE4
Memory / type	512MB SD Card	1 GB SD Card	2 GB SD Card	8GB internal	8GB internal
Max memory		32GB SDHC	32GB SDHC	Memory Stick Pro	32GB SDHC
Windshield	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Batteries	2x AA	2x AA	1x AAA	2x AA	2x AA
External power	Included	Included	Included	Included	Included
Plug and Play	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes
LCD Backlight	Yes (OLED)	Yes		Yes	Yes
Variable Pitch Control	No	Yes		Yes	No
Variable Speed Playback	Yes	Yes		Yes	No