does anyone go out and find sounds / capture atmosphere's?

anyone have any experience with this kind of thing / what kind of gear do you use for this?

i remember bajskorv's savage ideal project incorporated elements of this..

any recommendations / hints / tips much appreciated

I have no experience myself. However I know they make digital sound recorders with mic inputs. I imagine that's all you'd need.

Yep. I'm a freelance boom operator for video projects/music projects and I have all my own equipment (tends to get you more work).

I myself picked up a Tascam HD-P2 for my audio capturing, but the thing is very expensive (probably around a grand now). It sounds fucking remarkable though, and has phantom power and all sorts of particular changeable settings, etc.


But I think I know exactly what you're intending to do. Just go outside into the cityscape (city in my case) and record shit, the come home, dump it on your computer and edit/sample the shit out of everything? Yeah, that's a lot of fun.

Here's some pretty good info, and it also has a bunch of photos of the Zoom H4, which I almost bought some time ago. It just wasn't high-end enough for me to do film audio for, so I bought by Tascam. It's still a pretty nice looking little device

http://www.sweetwater.com/shop/studio/r ... -guide.php


Just a note too, you'll find a huge jump from low-end stuff to high-end stuff. As in, you can get a handheld recorder for 100-250 bucks, then one piece at maybe 500 bucks, and then everything else is 1000 bucks plus.

heh, is it that transparent?

thanks for the link, i'll check it out. funny i was looking at the zoom h4n earlier

Well, I mean, depends on specifics. I've walked around the city a couple times with my location recorder and my boom microphone just recording shit. Walked into a Pita Pit and asked if I could record their fridge because it sounded neat. Found myself recording boiling water at 4:00 am for a music project.

With handheld recorders, the quality GENERALLY is not going to be that great.

With something like my HD-P2, you get high-quality (up to 192kHz/24-bit if you really wanted it) and you can use a condenser microphone with the provided phantom power.
With a handheld, you're most likely going to get stuck with a battery-powered condenser that may or may not sound like crap. And with a good boom mic on a pole you can get to those hard-to-reach places, or ceiling corners in subway stations and shit.


Like I said, depends on what you wanna do. I was kinda vague in my response as you weren't overly specific.

thanks for the replies, and true enough

i'm looking for something i can go out and wander around with, record some noises or set it down somewhere to record a period of time, and get an ok quality out of it.

i'd prefer it if it was something i could just 'throw' into my pocket or bag. i'm fairly sure i don't need it to be incredible quality yet, because one, i can't afford to spend lots of money of recording equipment, two, the playback systems whatever i finish will go through won't be incredibly high end and three, i have incredibly limited experience with messing around with audio so i'll likely just destroy the quality anyway.

yesterday i was having a look at the zoom h4n handheld recorder jobby, which has apparently good reviews on the internet, given that it's a relatively low cost piece of equipment.

here is the product page, obviously there's going to be a fair amount of guff because the company wants to big up their product as much as possible, but what do you reckon?

that tascam recorder you are using would probably set me back around £800 ($1300) and i definitely don't have the money to get that, plus whatever else i would need to record.

the end results would probably at the most get used in university as part of an installation / collaged into song idea sketches with a friend of mine.

hopefully that gives a bit of a clearer picture of what i'm hoping to achieve, or what my needs are

Sounds like you just need something good enough to be worth owning. No sense in breaking the bank while getting your feet wet.

It's funny that the Zoom H4 keeps coming up, because when I was searching a few years back, it did the same thing. Encountered it everywhere. I think it's really popular.

Quite reliable as I understand it. And I was VERY close to buying one.

I just saw a website that said it's 500 bucks?? I remember it being less.

But I'm pretty sure there are quite a few cheapies out there to keep away from.


A good idea would be to go to all your local recording shops and see what they have in stock. That'll give you a chance to pull one out and get a good look at it.

I exhausted all the shops in Toronto before deciding on my Tascam.

And I did this so long ago that I forgot all the product names I checked out, and when people talk gear location recorders don't often come up.


I'm curious to hear what you decide on though. Do keep us posted.

There's the Zoom H2 also, which costs significantly less.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAOJQ_78Y7I