Official Luthiers Forum!

Have fun with that!
Recording is great fun.
It also improves your playing, a lot.
Just don't start buying all the stuff you can buy for that hobby!

The room is very important. I have a rather decent setup (2 Rode condensers, EMU external card total 600$) and record in 3 different rooms, each puts an incredibly different envelope on the sound, and each makes the instrument project differently. A customer brought his guitar I built for him to a studio for a pro recording, with eggcrate walls and $$$$ mics and gear, and it sounds worse than my worst setup. They tried several configurations so I assume that room was just bad, or the tech really sucked ?! In any case I was shocked by the result.

Other than this, every time I hear a zoom recording I am impressed by how nice it sounds for the money.

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Build log

I have girls. All I get is daaaaaaaaad.

Waddy,

The H4n has a very decent limiter built in with a couple of different settings. Using it, you can run slightly hotter levels and it will just compress a bit if it runs out of headroom.

I had an H4 and upgraded to the H4n about a year ago and am very happy with the unit. The mics on that unit have no business being that good for that price. I have an old set of Neumann KM184s which run around $1600 for the pair new and they are only a little bit better than the built ins for most applications!

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

I understand that it has that capability, but my experience tells me you can hear the difference. The recordings are much more live sounding when you record at a slightly lower level and normalize to somewhere in the 80% range. Now, you have to remember that my experience is recording classical guitar, only, and compression is the enemy!

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars