Back To My Roots

I received an invitation from my bank to attend an exclusive concert by Dutch chanteuse, Trijntje Oosterhuis, on Wednesday evening.

Now, this isn’t the kind of thing I’d normally want to be seen dead at (especially with the stipulation of a tenue de ville dress code), but it offered the ideal opportunity to try out my latest gadget, an Edirol R-09HR digital recorder.

I last recorded a concert about 19 years ago. I couldn’t even tell you know which concert it was, but it must have been some time in 1989 or 1990.

Back then, the Sony WM-D6C analogue cassette recorder and ECM-929LT microphone, also manufactured by Sony, were de rigeur for recording concerts (a.k.a. bootlegging, although this term has now become very unpopular with many who do it). In the interim, much has changed.

I missed the whole era of DAT and later MD, and have now returned to the field at a great time, because making recordings has never been easier. Not only do we now all record digitally, so there are no concerns about loss of quality and introduction of noise as successive generations of the original master tape are copied, but with flash memory as large as it now is, it’s the most obvious thing in the world to record straight to an SD card.

And so it is that I can now make 16 bit, 44 Khz (or even 24 bit, 96 Khz) recordings with ease. There are no moving parts that might break, the batteries in the recorder therefore last longer, I don’t have to rush to turn the C90 tape over half way through the set (taking care not to run out of tape halfway through a song), today’s recorders are smaller than ever, today’s microphones are even smaller, etc.

And, whereas my only editing tool used to be the Pause button of the recorder, everyone with a computer now has a choice of sound editing suites at his or her disposal. As a Linux user, that pretty much means Audacity in my case.

For anyone interested, the other equipment I now use for my recordings consists of two DPA 4060 omnidirectional microphones and a DPA MMA6000 microphone amplifier.

The fruit of my labours is now available in FLAC format as a torrent, thanks to DIME. The recording turned out very well, especially considering my total lack of experience with the new equipment.

Like I say, Trijntje Oosterhuis isn’t exactly my idea of good music, so I doubt I’ll be listening to this concert very often, but it was good practice and provided the chance to become familiar with the new gear without having to worry about messing up a recording that actually mattered.

The hors d’œuvres were nice, too.