Zoom H2 Digital Recorder

Like many musicians I have a career that does not involve music. Most of the people I work with know that I am a musician and due to that fact I get called on about once a year to do some sort of musical project. This year was no exception, I was given the task of recording of group singers.

Thanks to the podcast “Inside Home Recording“, I learned about the Zoom H2 hand held digital recorder. I bought it about two years ago to use as a digital sketch pad for my song ideas. It has served its purpose well and was an excellent tool for the recording I needed to do at work.

Since this was going to be an A Capella recording, we were going to need a way to get a starting pitch for the vocalists. I was able to download a pitch pipe app with my smart phone and used that to establish a starting pitch. Once we had the pitch we were able to capture what we wanted in 6 takes.

Once I got back to my home studio I was able connect the Zoom H2 to my computer and drag and drop the audio file that I wanted into the project folder I had created. Next I opened up Logic Studio and imported the audio to the first track. I started with some simple processing by adding a compressor and some reverb. The track was a little on the quiet side because I did not take the time to set the mic gain properly. I was fortunately able to bring the volume up with a compressor. For reverb I used a basic reverb with a big echoy sound since I was trying to emulate a choir.  After that, I could have been done…..but I kept going.

I decided that I wanted the voices louder, so I added a second compressor. Now, two compressors by any stretch is too much for most projects. In this case however it did the trick nicely, but at the same time pumped up the room noise quite a bit. To counter act the room noise I used a noise gate with the threshold set about -24db. I had to play around with it until I got the sound I wanted. Once I had the vocals beefed up I thought it would be nice to add some percussion. I opened up an orchestral percussion kit in Logic and played along with the track using my midi keyboard. I added a timpani and cymbal part this way. The singers that I was working with were all experienced and since they had their pitch from the pitch pipe, they were able to hold that pitch all through the song. Because of that fact I was able to add a “fake” choir as a background layer to fatten things up.

Everyone involved with the project was quite pleased with the results, but more importantly we all had a good time doing it. I am already looking forward to next years project!