Kevin I. Slaughter

My blog will often feature commentary on what I’m doing with Underworld Amusements. I don’t want to fill the UA blog up with non-essential materials, but that’s part of the reason why I started this. The total listens to the podcast over there is just over 3,500 – with the “test episode” having over 1,000 listens alone (a couple of days after the posting of the HR Giger episode, it has only about 180 listens). I considered pulling it down, but there’s some good stuff on it.

I recently recorded two interviews in the proverbial field (i.e., not over the phone) for UAVH, and figured I’d offer some sound samples and notes on what gear I used. I hardly know what I’m doing. I’ve done a bit of audio recording, but I’ve never had any kind of training or done any serious work with it outside of the few projects I’ve worked on over the years. My ears are as sophisticated as anything not sophisticated at all.

Below is a quick and dirty edited audio introducing recordings for two sound sources.

The first sample was recorded two ways. The first half is the Samson CO1U USB Condenser Mic connected to my 9″ Dell Vostro running the free audio recording program Audacity, the second half using the Blue Microphones Mikey connected to an Apple iPod Classic. The interviewee was speaking directly into the Samson, and the iPod was there as a backup recording just in case. It’s times like this I realize I do live a dysgenic life, forgoing children to buy electronic junk to record podcasts that few people listen to and hardly benefit mankind. Hah…

The second sample is a babbling brook recorded in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It was recorded with the Samon/Netbook but using Adobe Audition.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:52 — 5.4MB)

The netbook/Samson mic is a pretty great portable set-up, but that stand/Shockmount is a real pain in the ass to carry around. It doesn’t really break down into anything portable, and the base IS a big chunk of metal after all.

The big drawback to the CO1U is latency. I’ve installed ASIO4ALL to try to reduce it, but it doesn’t get it to where I can talk and listen with headphones at the same time. This tends to be pretty frustrating, and makes getting recording levels right a bit longer, or I end up not checking them and hoping I can fix them on the back end…

Related posts:

1. Listen to me!
2. Oct.31st – Nov. 1st :: HL Mencken Club 2009 Conference