Recording - December 2012 - 40

This holiday season, use your recording chops to capture treasures you can’t buy:

memories!
By Paul J. Stamler

December—a time to give. Giving to people you care about, giving to your community. How can you use the skills and equipment you’ve accumulated as a recordist to make people happy? For the last three Decembers you’ve given a CD of your songs to everyone on your list; maybe it’s time to try something new. Here’s an idea out of left field: what about using your talents and gear to do oral history with family members? Everyone has stories to tell. Did Grandpa get muddy at Woodstock? Did Grandma march against Jim Crow with Dr. King? These are the stories that give texture to history; they are your personal contact with the fabric of the world. And they pack some surprises. I knew my mother was a Rosie the Riveter, but had no idea that Dad knew Bluesman Big Bill Broonzy (“Not well, but I knew him”). The stories, and the surprises, enrich your world and that of your family. But as generations pass, the stories get lost. That’s where you come in, you and your microphone. Tech stuff and people Recording oral history, especially with family members, presents a different set of challenges from recording music. Musicians are (mostly) accustomed to microphones, are used to doing their thing with the red light on and a mic six inches from their mouth or instrument. Non-musician family members, particularly older people, often find the mic intimidating, even terrifying. Your job, therefore, is to keep the tech stuff unobtrusive and non-threatening. One obvious route is provided by the new generation of digital recorders, most of which come with built-in microphones that can be excellent for oral history work.

When you learn about your family, you learn about yourself and about how you fit into the world.

Let’s talk fundamentals first. You want to record oral history well, and that means recording .wav files, not .mp3s. Record in 24-bit; storage is cheap these days. And turn OFF any automatic gain control in your recorder; AGCs will pump the background noise level up and down, and squeeze any hint of dynamics out of your recording. (If needed, you can always add compression as you edit.) Instead, set the volume manually, and be conservative with levels; a recording that peaks at –10 dBFS is fine in 24-bit format. If your recorder has a hard limiter to prevent digital clipping, that might be worth using, but do a test recording first to make sure it’s transparent when not actually working. If your recorder has special effects (reverb, etc.), turn them off. You want the simplest possible recording for your interviews. For reasons I’ll discuss in a little while, a good place for a portable recorder is flat on a table, or better flat on a folded-up soft towel on the table. It’s good to place it so you can see the meters, and reach the controls. Ideally, though, once you start recording, you can leave the machine alone, which avoids distractions for your notused-to-recording subject.
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RECORDING December 2012

All you need is lav Another possibility for recording oral history is the lavalier microphone, or just lav. They are standard for television; they’re tiny, and barely show up on camera, yet they can give surprisingly good sound quality. Radio Shack sells a couple of models that aren’t half bad for the money; a miniplug-to-XLR adapter will enable you to plug into a standard mic preamp. It’s important to clip the lav close to the subject’s mouth; for men, clip it to their tie or the front of their shirt, right below the top button. For women, the front of a blouse or the neckline of a dress is good, but watch out for rustling fabric; if your subject is wearing a dress made from something noisy, perhaps another type of miking is called for. Whatever you do, try to position a lav mic on the same side as you’ll be sitting on; you don’t want the subject turning off-mic when they turn and face you. Lav mics are mostly omnidirectional; you might try putting one on yourself and one on your subject, but watch out for phase problems. The old “3-to-1 Rule” still works most of the time: if the distance between the two mics is at least 3 times the distance from the mic to the sound source (in this case the subject’s mouth), you should be okay. (That only works if the sound sources are about the same volume, but most of the time in oral history recordings they will be.) Quiet as a mouse Some people get nervous with lav mics pinned to them, or you may not have one handy. (On the other hand, some people like having a lav pinned on them; it makes them feel

Recording - December 2012

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