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Praise for the Zoom H2

tictactux

Distinguished Member
Distinguished Member
after toying around with my Zoom for a while (mostly to record myself which can be a revealing hence frustrating experience) I took it with my to my Band's spring concert. Pressed record twice, powered off during the intermission, did the same for the second half. No pre-recording, leveling and whatnot, just recorded the whole session out of the box.

The Zoom simply works. And because it is idiot-proof to operate, you're not going to miss some important stuff. Well spent money.

(I am in no way affiliated with that company)

Here are two excerpts; no beautification was done to the .wav files except from properly trimming start and end and converting them to mp3.

http://mvhw.hochstrasser.org/files/01-Snowbird.mp3
http://mvhw.hochstrasser.org/files/09-GummiMambo.mp3

(No, I didn't have a solo)
 
Sounds like a fun band to be in. The peeps in my bands who record use the Zoom H4 with great results. The last time we got a recording of a Big Band the Zoom H4 results were betting than the sound man's created with a rig that was way more expensive. We chalked it up to him usually recording rock rather than jazz music.

And here's a tip, when possible, place the video or audio recorder as far from the percussion section as possible. :)
 
And here's a tip, when possible, place the video or audio recorder as far from the percussion section as possible. :)

...and from the small brass. :emoji_rage:

The Zoom was in the middle, but so was the percussion section, dividing the "big band" from the flute/clarinet section. I don't know if this is meant as some kind of writing on the wall, but I understand why small woodwinds were eliminated from most bands - simply not enough volume!

The only possible place was the "official" microphone stand where I simply velcro-ed the Zoom onto. At the rehearsal two days before I put the Zoom on a chair that was placed in the middle of the then empty room. Way better results, even if the sound files required some normalization afterwards.
 
I'm also very impressed with the Zoom. We used one last fall to record a big band concert, and ended up with some good tracks for a demo:
http://www.thefalconaires.com/index.html

The setting was a school auditorium, and we put the recorder about 15 rows back from the stage. We had a fairly small audience that day, and seated them all behind the recorder. All it took was a little bit of tweaking and normalizing in Audacity to achieve the final result.
 
Couldn't agree more.

I recorded our concert band and quality was excellent. By the time I had tweaked it in Audacity (just really selecting some solos that sounded a bit remote and boosting them up) I ended up with a CD that was certainly of listenable quality.

Also, attached to a computer by USB, it is quite a reasonable input mike

Chris
 
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