Recording a vocal only session

[Msowers]

Hi,

This is my first post. I've read through many posts on this fourum to get a feel for the type and level of written responses. I read a lot about miking techniques for drums, vocals, guitars and miking principles--you people are really knowledgeable!

Here is my planned project: I am a practicing Yoga student and would like to record the audio portion of the 1.5 hour long workouts. Others may be as long as three hours and some may be serial and contiguous, i.e., structured classes. This is a rather different project from what many of you probably get involved with but certain principles do apply. I hope some of you are willing to chime in with some good suggestions.

Room description: The room is rather hard-no absorbent materials except drywall on one side and full length windows on two walls. Other wall is drywall on one-half and cabinets on remaining half. Ceiling is drywall. Floor is hard tile but not clay tile. The students range from 8 to 22 plus factor in the rubber sticky mats. Room is about 12 ft x 30 ft or so...I know its kinda small. But hey, this is Zürich.

What would you recommend in terms of miking the (male) teacher and room effects and including a decent recording device? This may evolve to a commercial pressing but that is a some time off in the future. During the last yoga practice on Thursday I was thinking to myself, it would be so cool to record this! A lot of valuable knowledge is brought to the fore during these yoga classes and it's a shame that it largely disappears. After the class, I brought this idea up to the teacher's attention and he was very receptive and enthusiastic.

This is a rather dynamic event; keep in mind also that the yoga teacher may walk around, help people correct body poses and even demonstrate poses. What kind of mic could one attach to someone who is very physical at times, a headset, lavalier? And naturally has to be wireless. Would you recommend one or two Omni-directional mics for overhead and also serve to capture the room acoustics/ambience? Would you suggest medium price range mics plus a pre-amp? What about a Boss or Yamaha digital recorder? I like the idea of purchasing gear that facilitates staging or progressive equipment upgrades so that one isn't stuck at a particular performance level and forced to start over. This way, equipment changes aren't painfully expensive.

Okay, it's long but thank you very much in advance!

Mark Sowers
Zürich

[Dan]

Many of the videos I've tried to make for the Meth Lab site have been of the fly-on-the-wall/documentary variety, which is sort of what you're trying to do with this. It's a lot harder to get usable, coherent material than you'd think w/o having a plan and a script to work from. Granted, I'm completely unschooled in film making and am likely less efficient and effective than I could be, but if you read up on how they do reality shows, you'll find that one episode can often require well over 100 hours of footage, and even then, a good portion of it is interviews rather than unscripted footage.

People convey a lot of information through body language, and relying on an audio recording of an instruction that was at least partially visual can leave holes in the message you'd like to convey. If you want to actually provide a teaching tool, you'd probably be better off making a video that was at least partially scripted.

To your technical questions:
Being able to use a lav mic on the instructor kind of depends on what he's wearing. If he's got a crew neck shirt with no collar, pockets, or lapels, clipping it to his collar comes with a very real chance that the mic could rub on his throat while he's talking, which sounds terrible. I'd go for a headset mic with an omni capsule and mic up everybody whose speech you want to hear.

I wouldn't count on omni room mics to pick up any sort of intelligible speech - they may work, but they may also pick up a ton of random garbage. The world is a lot noisier than you'd think and things like creaking floor boards, squeaking shoes, and crinkling floor mats just sound distracting. We're downstairs from an aerobics studio and try to work around their schedule, and their banging around is still a PITA and gets into my recordings sometimes. If all you want is ambience, maybe.

Regarding the recorder, there is a whole industry devoted to film/remote/location audio, which is closer to what you'd want. Most stuff is capable of running on batteries, which is helpful if there's limited access to outlets in your gym and crucial if there's a danger of someone tripping over your extension cord. Portable recorders are readily available from 2-8 channels, with a handful that do more.

-Dan.