Resonant Constellation

Those of you who actually read this blog (I’m amazed there’s any, actually) may remember from my post on the 1st that I said:

I had a hell of a lot of fun, and I look forward to continuing this session. Next week I’ll try to get a recording of the action and post it here.

The moment I wrote those words and pressed the “Publish” button on my WP-admin page, I began an epic quest to find a suitable field recorder. I did not sleep (beyond my usual 7 hours), I did not eat (any more than I usually would have), I spent every waking moment (that wasn’t otherwise occupied by, for example, contemplating naval lint) searching for my next gadget.

Like a true geek, I did my research on this one. I laid out a spreadsheet to compare the properties of each individual gadget to the next (things like frequency response, sample rate, recording format, storage size, stereo mics, price, etcetera). There turned out to be three distinct categories of devices I considered: fully dedicated, hi-fi, super expensive, multi-directional, multiple microphone recorders (Example: Zoom H2, which I still may get if I can scrape together money [ha ha!]), stereo and mono voice recorders which were slightly smaller, and less high quality (usually “CD” quality at 44.1 kHz sampling and ~800Hz-1kHz response), though consistently $50 cheaper (Example: Olympus DS-40), and finally the iPod attachment variety, which is basically a device that you plug into your iPod and record directly onto it (Example: Belkin TuneTalk).

This last category had many sub-categories (mono, stereo, power adapter capable, external source, various quality settings), but the most outstanding feature is that they are practically all dirt cheap compared to the other gizmos I was looking at. My dilemma at this point was that there was no one device which clearly was superior in the price versus quality department, so I turned to the mandolin cafe message boards where I’d seen posts about this kind of product. My question was instantly addressed, and I found a very nice guy by the name of Fred who was willing to send me some recordings made with the Belkin iPod device. The sound quality of these far surpassed my expectations, so I ended up getting the Belkin TuneTalk from Amazon for about $30. Just a few days later, it has arrived and is in my hands! Here’s a quick little recording I made:

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I hope you’ll agree that, besides the playing, it sounds pretty good (quality-wise). Hopefully I’ll get some good recordings at the session this weekend and I’ll be able to share them with you here!