A Recording Free Sound expedition

My first real expedition with this new rig was a three week trip to West and East Africa. I started in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso where I was attending the bi-annual film festival Fespaco. Pretty quickly I discovered how cumbersome traveling with that much gear can be. Added to that, my schedule and complete incompetence in French, Moore or any of the other 68 languages spoken in Burkina Faso, kept me in the center of the city the whole time, rather than out in the rural areas like I had hoped. None the less, I was able to do some recording of urban and suburban Ouagadougou. I've uploaded one of the recordings to Free sound.

Recording with 4 microphones is exponentially more complex than recording with two. It's nearly twice as much gear, and it's a whole lot of cables. It takes a while to put together, and usually by the time everything is set up, a boisterous crowd has gathered to see what it is that is going on. I also had a difficult time with what I thought was RF interference in at least one microphone at any given time. I later discovered that the phantom power of my recorder was probably not sufficient to power all 4 microphones.

The second half of my trip was in Ethiopia. I actually do speak enough Amharic to get around, so this trip was much more fruitful, though not entirely without difficulties. Again, I was plagued by the interference I was getting in one of my microphones. I also ran into some trouble by setting up outside of a government office. I was trying to record a group of minibus touts, but I also ended up recording an argument about whether I could record there and whether or not I was a spy. When I traveled outside of the capital to some more rural areas I didn't take my gear with me because it was cumbersome and because I was unsure of it's security. There were several occasions where I really wish that I had brought it along, particularly when I encountered a pack of hyenas and another time when I came a cross a traditional wedding party, with ululations and all.

In the end, I was able to get some useful recordings out of the trip, but I definitely had learned a couple lessons. The second lesson actually took me a few more expeditions to get through my head, but I'll share it first. It was that a multichannel recording is not very practical, and probably not even that useful. Initially it seemed useful, and marketable, but now that I have more experience mixing in surround, I would rather use several Sound ambiances that fit well together than a surround ambiance.

The first lesson I had learned was that I needed to have a more discrete, portable and potentially disposable recording setup. I ended up buying a minidisc recorder and a Audio Technica 822 stereo mic. I realized that this wouldn't give me the recording quality of the Deva, but a recording of slightly lesser quality is more important to me than not having the sound at all. I've recorded plenty of material using this setup and I take it with me nearly every where I go. If there is something specific that I need to record I will take my Deva setup (though now I only use two channels), but if I am just out and about and hear a Free Sound I want to record, I just pull the minidisc out of my jacket pocket and start recording—usually without anyone even noticing.