H4n Live Music Recording with Viking Moses & Brandon Holdt at Espresso News

Small Venue Music Photography & H4n Live Music Recording

First experience using the Zoom H4n Handy Recorder to record live music, not bad!

Music Photography

I’ve gone over the wonderful challenges of small venue music photography,  nothing has changed. Lighting, people, small, and all awesome. So there’s that.

H4n Recording

I used the Zoom H4n to record this most recent show at ENews. My super ‘pro’ setup for this H4n live music recording experience was a gorilla pod, a set of $7 ear buds, and a gorilla pod. The gorilla pod really was a game changer here, highly recommendo.

The part that really rustled my jimmies was trying to figure out where to place the little sound troll. With people everywhere and the ENews being small as it is, a tripod was out of the question. I could have put it on the counter, but then how would the patrons get their beers and espressos?

And then, yes it did children, the firmament opened and little fairythings started their chorus. My gorilla pod in hand, I turned that sound troll into some sort of wall hugging sound troll spider abomination of H4n live music recording magic.

The set up was dead center and about 12′ from each of the speakers (12′ from the left, about 12 feet from the right). I had the recording quality set to MP3 @ 80kbps and I set the recording volume to about 48-50. The fuzzy troll hair was key and I got very little jibberjabber noise from the peoples and there was barely any white noise or hum. I did a little of n00b mastering in Audition, but generally speaking what you hear on the recording is what I got from the H4n live music recording.

It worked perfectly, by the way, and I used my earbuds to check the sound every now and again while in between shooting what photos could be squeezed from the dimness and darkness. An excellent set up and the audio quality turned out much better than I expected, though I’ll straightforward the idea that I really had no idea what to expect. Neverthelesses, check out the music of Viking Moses and Brandon Holdt as heard through the troll-muffed stereo mics of the Zoom H4n live music recording at Espresso News.

Check out the H4n live audio quality at BooneLive on Vimeo