Location, location, location

[ubizmo]

It occurs to me that some of the distortion problems I've been plagued with are probably not caused by not having a decent microphone.  They may be caused by the fact that I'm always playing in fairly confined spaces: my little study here or my car.  Neither space is acoustically dead, and I think I may be hitting resonant frequencies in both places, causing certain notes to sound distorted.  Short of having a proper studio, I suspect that even with a better microphone, I'll do better in less enclosed spaces.  At least, that's my latest theory.  Maybe someone who knows more about this knows better?

ubi

[Laurent]

Hi Ubi,

with low-ends microphones, you could also hit the resonant frequency of the microphone itself. Do you have a rec level setting on your recorder? Did you check that it's low enough? For my video, I recorded with a behringer condenser microphone (don't have the full reference here), and the ocarina was something like 30cm from the microphone, in front of it (but upper, to avoid the air blast in the microphone), with the rec level of the mix table at midway. I'll try some other positions with my zoom h2 recorder.

Laurent