Speaker 1: This week, I'm traveling to the NAMM show in Anaheim, California to get a look at the latest audio gear and to meet the people behind our favorite music and our favorite brands. While I'm there, I want to capture a few interviews from the expo floor to help you stay up to date with what's happening in the industry. There's just one problem, though. The show is one day away, and I need to find a way to record those interviews with the gear I already have. I can't just bring the same gear that I use here in my studio for recording music and videos. I won't be able to set up a camera tripod, a big light on a stand, a mic on a boom arm, or an audio interface connected to a desktop computer. That would be ridiculously inconvenient in a big crowd like the one we're expecting at NAMM. Instead, I need something that's more portable that I can quickly set up, record an interview, and move on. The video and lighting side will be pretty easy. Modern smartphones have really good cameras, and the lighting in the building will be sufficient for what I'm doing. The main obstacle will be to capture high-quality audio in a big crowd of people without bulky stands or cables getting in the way. Usually, when I record something on location, I have a few go-to setups. For a simple two-track stereo recording, I can bring my laptop and my RME Babyface Pro FS. It has two microphone inputs, two instrument inputs, and two outputs built in. When I need more inputs or outputs, I simply connect my Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 to the RME interface with ADAT cables, which gives me an additional eight microphone preamps. You could do the same thing with any audio interface and 8-channel mic preamp with ADAT connections. As powerful and compact as this system is, there are a few problems with using this for the NAMM show. First, I've only hired one friend to help me. He'll already be holding the camera for interviews, and I'd be asking a lot of one guy if I expected him to hold the camera, a rack full of equipment, and operate a DAW on a laptop. Even if it was all mounted onto a rolling rack, that's still a lot of gear to push around through an expo floor filled with thousands of people. Both my RME Fireface UCX-2 and my Tascam Model 12 are capable of recording directly to an SD card without the need for a laptop or DAW. I could connect the microphones directly to one of these devices and use it as a portable recorder. However, both of these require a connection to a power outlet. I'm not sure I'll have access to power at every booth, and I'd like to avoid creating tripping hazards with power cables if possible. So, I need an all-in-one audio recorder that's battery powered. There are several options out there ranging from entry-level to highly professional. My dream would be to buy one of these Sound Devices portable recorders. I've used their recorders in the past, and I can tell you that you get what you pay for with this stuff. They have incredible preamps and converters, and they're generally very robust. In fact, I think the audio department at my university is still using the exact units that I used when I was a student 10 years later. But those are a little bit outside of my budget. I considered going for a Zoom F-Series portable recorder. These are similar to the Sound Devices recorders, but with more affordable preamps and components. They still offer 32-bit floating point though, which is a great feature for field recording when you don't want a clipping mic to ruin your one chance to capture a moment. Either the Sound Devices or the Zoom F-Series recorders would be a great option, but I'm leaving tomorrow and I wouldn't be able to get them delivered in time. Luckily, I've already got a Zoom H8, which is kind of the little sibling of the Zoom F-Series. The Zoom H8 is battery powered, and it has six built-in microphone preamps, which is more than enough for these interviews. I also found this strap on Amazon that will allow me to monitor the audio and easily make adjustments, making sure everything sounds good in headphones while recording. Assuming that I'll be using the Zoom H8 for recording the audio, I still need to choose the microphones. The Zoom H8 has built-in XY stereo mics, but on the show floor it's going to be very noisy, so I don't think these are going to cut it. One option might be to use a shotgun microphone on a boom pole, but there are a few reasons why I'm not going to take that route. The first is because, again, I'll only have one guy helping me and his hands will already be full holding the camera and getting the microphone levels. The second reason is that while shotgun microphones do help with rejecting surrounding noise, they are typically only effective from about 2kHz and above. Below that frequency, they behave just like any other supercardioid microphone, so there will still be a lot of noise unless we get a very tight camera frame to get the mic closer to the person speaking. Third, the noise I'm trying to reject and the signal that I'm trying to capture are both human voices that will likely fall within the same frequency range, so the listener may still have trouble distinguishing between the two. Ideally, I need to get a microphone as close to the person speaking as possible so that the level of their voice will be much louder than the level of the surrounding voices. I think this is a situation for a lavalier microphone or a handheld microphone. While I have a few lavalier mics, they're designed to be used with wireless belt packs. Using wireless mics would of course help with the cable problem, but I think this particular event will be uniquely challenging from a wireless standpoint. It's the NAMM show, so Shure, Sennheiser, Lectrosonics, and every other wireless microphone manufacturer will be demonstrating their wireless products. There will also be a lot of other content creators like me at the show using wireless mics. The more wireless activity there is in a given area, the more difficult it will be to find reliable frequencies for my own wireless microphone systems without experiencing dropouts or creating dropouts in other people's systems. In fact, I expect there's a whole team of people at this show who are responsible for managing this, organizing and enforcing what frequencies are allowed to be used and which ones are reserved. They probably wouldn't be very happy with me if I just strolled in and started blasting wireless signals on a random frequency without any regard for others. This isn't to say that wireless belt packs or wireless handheld mics aren't a good choice for a situation like this. I would just want to be more prepared. So, I'm going to stick to wired microphones and avoid these problems altogether. I'll just need to make sure that the cables are tidy and don't create tripping hazards. Originally, I thought I might just hold on to the Zoom H8 recorder myself so that there wouldn't be any cables between me and my camera guy, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized why that wouldn't be the right way to go about it. First of all, that would mean that the audio recordings wouldn't be monitored in real time, which would open me up to the possibility of getting home to edit the files and realizing that the audio quality was terrible or that a microphone had a buzz during an important section of an interview. Putting the Zoom recorder with my assistant will mean that he can monitor the audio through headphones in real time, so even if there is a technical problem, at least we'll know when it happens and have the opportunity to adjust. Another reason I need the Zoom recorder to be with the camera is to help make editing easier later on by synchronizing the audio. In my editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro, I can synchronize the audio from the camera with the audio from the recorder and align the audio and video automatically. In this case, it will be too noisy for the camera microphone to reliably pick up the interview audio though, and that's why I'll be using the line out on my H8 recorder to create a feed that goes into the line in on my camera. If the mix sounds good, this could mean that the audio and video will already be synchronized in the same file, but it's much more likely that I'll need to sync the multitrack recordings from the recorder with the camera footage, and sending an audio feed from the audio recorder to the camera will make this much easier in post-production. Make sure to keep an eye out for these interview videos to be published over the coming days and weeks. If you're going to be at the show, I hope to see you there.