[Harp-L] Tweaking Zoom H4 live recordings

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've received a few comments on the quality of the recording of the London seminar whose URL I posted to Harp-L and Harptalk.  I thought it worth mentioning that I don't just put the raw live recordings out there--I do a few tweaks, which I'll describe now.

First, I load the original mp3 file(s) into Cakewalk Sonar, my digital audio workstation of choice.  Once it's in Sonar, the first thing I do is draw volume "envelopes" on the track to reduce some of the big peaks.  For example, on the London recording, there were a few places where the applause from the audience was about 12 dB louder than anything else on the track, and I reduced the level of those sections so I could eventually make the whole track louder.

Then I export the whole track as a WAV file, in this case 16 bit 44.1 kHz, normalize it to about 95% volume levels in Cool Edit Pro, my favorite stereo audio editor, save it as a WAV again and bring it back into Sonar for more tweaking.  I use WAVs at this point because every time you save a file as an mp3, you further degrade the audio quality.  

Once it's in back in Sonar, I apply multi-band compression to smooth out some of the remaining peaks in particular frequency ranges, and I check the overall frequency content using Voxengo's SPAN.  Then I apply a little EQ if necessary to sweeten the recording--in this case I put in a small boost with a wide Q around 3.75 kHz to add a little upper midrange.  Finally, I put on a limiter to raise the overall level and smooth out the remaining peaks, and I export the track in its finished form, after which I convert it back to mp3 (usually 192 kbps, which is a pretty high-fidelity form that's a lot more compact than 16-bit WAV).   

I mention all this because I think a lot of people just assume that you get great recordings out of the Zoom H4 and similar devices.  What you get out of those devices, if you pay attention to your levels and the placement of the device in the room, is great raw material.  It doesn't sound like a really good recording until you do a little work on it.  The thing that you have going for you in all this is that the Zoom and similar machines make recordings with very little noise, so when you start editing you can do a lot of things to the dynamic range without making the noise unbearable.

Hope this is useful, regards, Richard Hunter
latest mp3s and harmonica blog at http://myspace.com/richardhunterharp