Writ­ing by Voice

Equip­ment for Voice Recording

 

Writing by Voice

by Joseph T. Sinclair

Writ­ing by voice isn’t for every­one or every book. But give it a try to see if it works for you. You may find, as I did, writ­ing by voice makes it eas­i­er to get your writ­ing down on paper, so to speak, more quick­ly, smooth­ly, and coher­ent­ly than with a word processor.

Equipment for Voice Recording

by Joseph T. Sinclair

As the pop­u­lar­i­ty for the spo­ken voice grows for use in web­sites and blogs, in ebooks and book apps (dig­i­tal books), and in dig­i­tal train­ing and oth­er dig­i­tal mul­ti­me­dia  pre­sen­ta­tions, you need to get up to date on the equip­ment you can use to pro­fes­sion­al­ly record voice.

The cur­rent equip­ment for record­ing voice is much more com­pe­tent and much less expen­sive than it was just a few years ago. The chip­mak­ers make audio chips in huge vol­umes inex­pen­sive­ly , which do mirac­u­lous things, take up lit­tle space, and require lit­tle ener­gy. These tiny chips appear in all dif­fer­ent types of audio equip­ment from sim­ple head­sets to the com­plex audio sys­tems inside many present-day desk­top, lap­top, tablet, and smart phone com­put­ers. Thus, today you can buy a first-rate voice recorder for dic­ta­tion for less than $50.

But dic­ta­tion is not what you’re after. What you’re after is good sol­id spo­ken voice record­ings with pro­fes­sion­al sound. For that you need a cer­tain min­i­mum grade of record­ing equip­ment. This arti­cle focus­es upon that min­i­mum thresh­old of qual­i­ty. As you know, you can spend as much as you want to for micro­phones, record­ing equip­ment, and audio edit­ing soft­ware. But you’re not try­ing to make a plat­inum hit tune record­ing. So in most cas­es you only need some­thing at the min­i­mal lev­el of qual­i­ty or above.

With the advent of tablets and apps, you will note that dig­i­tal books have become a major part of the over­all book mar­ket. In the last cou­ple of years, author­ing soft­ware has become eas­i­er to use and less expen­sive, and the trends will con­tin­ue in the future. What this means is that it will be much eas­i­er to inte­grate audio into dig­i­tal books via author­ing soft­ware in the future.

With the advent of HTML5, it is now quite easy to inte­grate audio into web­pages with very lit­tle con­fu­sion, frus­tra­tion, or effort. In addi­tion, it has become appar­ent that HTML5 will be the basis for future dig­i­tal books as they evolve into more robust mul­ti­me­dia pub­li­ca­tions. Thus, we can expect that audio will con­tin­ue to evolve as a media in dig­i­tal form and will be used more and more for infor­ma­tion products.

Think of dig­i­tal (and online) train­ing is just an exten­sion of a “How To” dig­i­tal book. Train­ing prod­ucts in a dig­i­tal for­mat have been used by col­leges, uni­ver­si­ties, and oth­er train­ing orga­ni­za­tions for well over a decade. Many of the inno­va­tions in using mul­ti­me­dia with text were devel­oped in these dig­i­tal train­ing prod­ucts. For train­ing, the evo­lu­tion of inte­grat­ing audio into dig­i­tal learn­ing prod­ucts con­tin­ues and will accel­er­ate in the future.

All in all, the future is bright for the inte­gra­tion of audio into dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion prod­ucts from books to train­ing cours­es. The actu­al inte­gra­tion of audio is beyond the scope of this arti­cle, how­ev­er, and this arti­cle sim­ply pro­vides you with a review of the equip­ment you need to pro­fes­sion­al­ly record the spo­ken voice yourself.

As a prac­ti­cal mat­ter it’s easy to make a record­ing of your own voice. It’s even easy to do an inter­view. And it is easy to do a pan­el dis­cus­sion with a mod­er­a­tor. There are spe­cial­ty sit­u­a­tions, how­ev­er, where you may not be suc­cess­ful in record­ing voice in a pro­fes­sion­al man­ner with­out some assis­tance from an audio engi­neer or some­one else equal­ly as knowl­edge­able. For instance, record­ing voice with video has its own spe­cial prob­lems that require expertise.

Although record­ing voice can be easy to do and easy to man­age, your per­for­mance as a record­ing artist is anoth­er mat­ter. And that’s beyond the scope of this arti­cle but nonethe­less some­thing that you will need to pay atten­tion to.

With­out giv­ing spe­cif­ic prices—only gener­ic estimates—I have tried to give you an idea of what equip­ment might cost. The cost esti­mates are based on wide­ly dis­count­ed prices, not man­u­fac­tures’ list prices.

Microphones

A voice record­ing starts with a micro­phone. You will want to use the best mic that you can afford. Although cost is often a good gauge to use for mic qual­i­ty, you can still find some bargains.

Good mics are more respon­sive and pro­vide bet­ter sounds than mediocre mics. Inex­pen­sive mics can actu­al­ly sound pret­ty good which indi­cates how high the qual­i­ty of audio elec­tron­ics is today com­pared to 15 years ago. But expen­sive mics sound better.

Right around $100–150 seems to be the bot­tom of the pro­fes­sion­al mic range, and you have your choice of sev­er­al time-proven mics in this price range.

Before you choose, how­ev­er, you need to decide what kind of mic you need. You have two con­sid­er­a­tions to make: direc­tion and sig­nal strength.

Direction

From which direc­tions does the mic suck in the sound? It makes a difference.

Unidirectional Mics

Car­dioid (uni­di­rec­tion­al) mics pick up sound direct­ly in front and to a less­er extent to the sides. Because uni­di­rec­tion­al mics do not pick up much sound to the sides or to the rear, they are good in sit­u­a­tions where feed­back is a poten­tial prob­lem such as at per­for­mances which use loud speak­ers on the stage (so long as they are not point­ed at the speak­ers). They do a good job of elim­i­nat­ing back­ground noise so long as the pri­ma­ry source of the back­ground noise falls out­side their pick­up pattern.

Uni­di­rec­tion­al mics work well for record­ing voic­es at a train­ing pre­sen­ta­tion where each pre­sen­ter has their own mic. One uni­di­rec­tion­al mic does­n’t work well to record two voic­es when placed direct­ly between the two peo­ple (i.e., the sound comes to the mic from the sides). It works a lit­tle bet­ter when placed in an off­set posi­tion between the two people.

Omnidirectional Mics

An omni­di­rec­tion­al mic is respon­sive to sound all around it.

Omni­di­rec­tion­al mics pro­vide a more nat­ur­al sound because they pick up back­ground noise. After all, we hear sound against a back­ground of noise. So long as the back­ground noise is not out of con­trol, omni­di­rec­tion­al mics can pro­vide a good sound. An omni­di­rec­tion­al mic between two peo­ple, or more, will pick up all the voic­es and may work well for mul­ti­ple voice pre­sen­ta­tions where indi­vid­ual mics are not con­ve­nient. But beware of excess back­ground noise.

Signal strength

A mic is an ana­log device and mechan­i­cal­ly pro­duces a weak sig­nal in response to sound. Two dif­fer­ent types of mics each han­dle the sig­nal differently.

Dynamic Mics

Dynam­ic mics can be either uni­di­rec­tion­al or omni­di­rec­tion­al. They work strict­ly in phys­i­cal response to sound and require no pow­er. They are not as respon­sive as con­denser mics (see next sec­tion), and they exhib­it a phe­nom­e­na known as the prox­im­i­ty effect. When you speak too close to them (about 3 inch­es), they con­vey an exces­sive bass sound. When you speak too far away (over 12 inch­es), their response dimin­ish­es. Con­se­quent­ly, you must use pre­cise mic place­ment to max­i­mize the qual­i­ty of the sound.

side­bar Prox­im­i­ty is Your Friend

Use the prox­im­i­ty effect to your advan­tage to deep­en and enrich your voice. You won’t be the first.

Dynam­ic mics do not per­form well record­ing from a dis­tance. For instance, a dynam­ic mic does not make a good omni­di­rec­tion­al mic for record­ing a mul­ti-per­son pre­sen­ta­tion unless the peo­ple are unusu­al­ly close together.

Condenser Mics

Con­denser mics can be either uni­di­rec­tion­al or omni­di­rec­tion­al. Con­denser mics use inter­nal elec­tron­ics to boost the weak ana­log sig­nal and make the mics more responsive.

A voice can be up to 24 inch­es away from the mic and still be picked up with robust qual­i­ty. One con­denser mic can effec­tive­ly pick up the voic­es from a mul­ti-per­son pre­sen­ta­tion. If you can’t find a place to record that has low ambi­ent back­ground noise, how­ev­er, don’t try to use a con­denser mic; they’re too sen­si­tive. They will pick up even the faintest back­ground noise. Because pro­fes­sion­al-qual­i­ty con­denser mics include inter­nal elec­tron­ics, they are more expensive.

Elec­tret con­denser mics are much less expen­sive and just as respon­sive as con­denser mics. They are pop­u­lar for lava­liere mics (tiny mics that attach to a shirt or coat lapel or hang around the neck). But elec­tret con­denser mics are not nec­es­sar­i­ly high qual­i­ty mics. In con­trast, vir­tu­al­ly all con­denser mics are high qual­i­ty mics.

Because a con­denser mic uses inter­nal elec­tron­ics to ampli­fy its sig­nal, such elec­tron­ics add noise to the sig­nal. Although the noise may be almost imper­cep­ti­ble, it remains one con­sid­er­a­tion in using a con­denser mic, par­tic­u­lar­ly an elec­tret con­denser mic.

If you need to record from afar or want to get full response for a crisper sound, par­tic­u­lar­ly for dig­i­tal record­ings, a con­denser mic makes a good choice. To put things in prop­er per­spec­tive, how­ev­er, you do not need con­denser mics to pro­duce pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty sound.

Mic Power

Con­denser mics and elec­tret con­denser mics need pow­er to work. They run on bat­ter­ies or phan­tom pow­er. You sup­ply phan­tom pow­er to a mic via a bal­anced cable (XLR). A pro­fes­sion­al mix­er pro­vides the source of the phan­tom pow­er. Some recorders also sup­ply phan­tom power.

Pow­er adds a lay­er of oper­at­ing main­te­nance that may not be worth the effort. You must make sure con­denser mics are turned off when not used and turned on when used (so bat­ter­ies don’t burn out pre­ma­ture­ly). You need to car­ry spare bat­ter­ies with you into the field and remove the bat­ter­ies for mics that will not be in use for a long time.

If you use phan­tom pow­er (up to 48 volts) instead of bat­ter­ies, you need to be care­ful that you fol­low rec­om­mend­ed oper­a­tional pro­ce­dures; oth­er­wise you may per­ma­nent­ly dam­age an item of equipment.

If you can live with­out the sen­si­tiv­i­ty that a con­denser mic pro­vides, you might con­sid­er lim­it­ing your mics to the dynam­ic variety.

Cost

Cheap mics (below $70) can sound pret­ty good these days because an up-to-date dig­i­tal recorder is so much bet­ter in the low-end price range than just ten or fif­teen years ago. But you will want high­er qual­i­ty mics for pro­fes­sion­al recordings.

Micro­phones at about $70 rep­re­sent the insti­tu­tion qual­i­ty used in pub­lic places such as church­es, schools, and audi­to­ri­ums but are not nec­es­sar­i­ly designed for record­ing. About $100 rep­re­sents the low end of micro­phones used for enter­tain­ment and broad­cast­ing (pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty). But mics can cost thou­sands, and stu­dio and broad­cast mics cost­ing between $300 and $1,000 are com­mon­ly used in pro­fes­sion­al audio pro­duc­tion (e.g., radio stations).

side­bar Built-in Mics

Some recorders have built-in mics. These mics are right next to the record­ing mech­a­nism, and they can pick up elec­tron­ic noise.  They’re usu­al­ly not the high­est qual­i­ty.  Thus, it’s uncer­tain whether you’ll be able to cre­ate com­mer­cial qual­i­ty record­ings with such mics.

If you have a tight bud­get, your mon­ey is bet­ter spent on a good mic than on any oth­er item you might purchase.

Lone Voice

If you record alone and not in a stu­dio, the choice of mics is easy. Use a car­dioid dynam­ic mic. A dynam­ic mic will not pick up ambi­ent noise, and you can record in almost any qui­et place. If you use a con­denser mic, it will pick plen­ty of ambi­ent noise (e.g., a dog bark­ing in your back yard or next door). In addi­tion, for a con­denser mic you will have to cre­ate a record­ing space that sim­u­lates a stu­dio (e.g., car­pet­ing on the floor, blan­kets over the win­dows, blan­kets hang­ing on the walls, and oth­er acousti­cal treatment).

A $100 pro­fes­sion­al dynam­ic mic for singers makes an excel­lent choice.  The Shure SM58, the Audio Tech­ni­ca ATM41a and ATM410, and com­pa­ra­bles at around $100 are ade­quate. Keep in mind that mics are essen­tial­ly ana­logue devices, not an inven­tion of the dig­i­tal age. The old mod­els are not nec­es­sar­i­ly obsolete.

I have used a vari­ety of mics under $400 over the years includ­ing sev­er­al con­denser mics. And I’ve end­ed up sell­ing all of them on eBay except the two which I still use. They are the Shure  SM7b and the Audio Tech­ni­ca ATM41a, both dynam­ic mics. If you want to spring $300 for a stu­dio mic, the Shure SM7b and Heil PR40 are good choices.

Stand

You will need a sol­id mic stand, either a floor mod­el or desk­top mod­el. These are not expen­sive items. Do not record with the mic in your hand.

Mixer

You will need a pro­fes­sion­al mix­er to record with more than one mic whether dynam­ic or condenser.

For a dynam­ic mic you will most like­ly need a pre­amp to make the sig­nal strong enough to record. It’s bet­ter to use a mix­er, how­ev­er, as a mix­er has pre­amps built in and pro­vides addi­tion­al con­trols over the sig­nal that may come in handy. For mul­ti­ple dynam­ic mics, a mix­er can save you the cost of mul­ti­ple preamps.

For con­denser mics you will need the phan­tom pow­er sup­plied by a mix­er. Some con­denser mics, how­ev­er, have their own bat­tery pow­er sup­ply, and you can use one (but not more than one) with­out a mixer.

You’re not record­ing in a music stu­dio, so you won’t need a 35 chan­nel mix­er. A small mix­er will do, one with enough chan­nels to plug in each mic that you use. A mini-mix­er, such as the Mack­ie 402-VLZ3, the 402-VLZ4 (about $90), or com­pa­ra­ble is fine for just one or two mics.

Pop Filter

There is a prob­lem with the human voice. It pops with plo­sives. To mit­i­gate such ungain­ly sounds you need to use a pop fil­ter. This is mere­ly a hoop with nylon stretched over, which you place in front of a mic. It’s held in place by a long flex­i­ble arm that attach­es to your mic stand.

A pop fil­ter is incon­ve­nient, awk­ward,  and just anoth­er item to keep track of and set up. There is anoth­er way which you may find  accept­able. First, you can take and put a foam cov­er over your micro­phone. There are thin foam cov­ers avail­able for the reduc­ing plo­sives and heavy-duty foam cov­ers for decreas­ing wind noise. These affect the qual­i­ty of the sound, but not so much, in my opin­ion, that you need to wor­ry about it. A wind cov­er, of course, is only to be used out­side when there is a breeze.

The sec­ond way to deal with the pop prob­lem is to take a nylon stock­ing (hose) and stretch it over the micro­phone. This may not be some­thing you want to do in pub­lic, but in pri­vate it’s OK.

If you find that either of these workarounds degrades the sound too much, use a reg­u­lar pop filter.

There are some micro­phones that come with a foam pop fil­ter build in, such as a Shure SM7a. Such micro­phones have been engi­neered to be used with­out an exter­nal pop filter.

Recorder

The dig­i­tal record­ing tech­nol­o­gy has advanced so far in the last fif­teen years or so that today’s $150 dig­i­tal recorder pro­duces the pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty of yesterday’s $900 recorder and can do so in a very small pack­age. Such recorders can even come with XLR mic inputs, (infor­ma­tion on XLR below), phan­tom pow­er, or pre­amps. Check out the TASCAM, Sony, Zoom, Roland, M‑Audio, and Olym­pus brands, which are all avail­able at discounts.

You want to be able to record in PCM mode to cre­ate a WAV file at a bit rate of 24 and a sam­pling fre­quen­cy of 96 kHz to insure max­i­mum qual­i­ty (bet­ter than CD qual­i­ty). If you need to, you can eas­i­ly con­vert to oth­er dig­i­tal file for­mats (e.g., mp3) with audio edit­ing software.

These small recorders come with built-in elec­tret con­denser mics. The mic qual­i­ty for some may be mar­gin­al­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry so long as you don’t hold the recorder in your hand. Use a mini cam­era tri­pod (inex­pen­sive) as a stand for the recorder. Still, a dynam­ic mic(s) is prefer­able in a non-stu­dio setting.

Can you direct­ly plug in a dynam­ic mic and expect to get an ade­quate sound lev­el? Per­haps. It’s worth a try. But my expe­ri­ence is that you will need a mix­er or pre­amp to boost the sig­nal of a dynam­ic mic enough to make a good recording.

Cables

You can save a bun­dle by buy­ing cheap cables, right? After all, they’re only wires.

Don’t count on it. In fact, don’t do it. Sub­stan­dard cables can decrease the qual­i­ty of your sound con­sid­er­ably and even intro­duce noise or inter­fer­ence. Use only pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty cables, con­nec­tors, and adapters.

side­bar First Time

The first time I hooked up a mic and a recorder with an unshield­ed cable, I picked up the local radio sta­tion. You can imag­ine my sur­prise when I played back the record­ing and found I had an unex­pect­ed accompaniment.

There are two types of mic cables: high imped­ance unbal­anced, and low imped­ance balanced.

Gen­er­al­ly, inex­pen­sive mics are high imped­ance and use an unbal­anced cable per­ma­nent­ly attached to the mic with a 1/4‑inch jack or a 3.5mm mini jack at the oth­er end. These mics work OK in many sit­u­a­tions with short cables. With long cables, they tend to pick up noise.

If you use high qual­i­ty mics, you will find that vir­tu­al­ly all are low imped­ance, have XLR con­nec­tions, use bal­anced cables, but do not come with a cable. Bal­anced (XLR) cables give you a mea­sure of safe­ty that will pay off soon­er or lat­er, and you can pur­chase such cables in a vari­ety of lengths from 3 feet to 50 feet.

What do you do if you have a low imped­ance mic with a bal­anced cable but need to plug it into a high imped­ance input? You need a transformer.

A mic imped­ance-match­ing trans­former enables you to use a low imped­ance mic for a high imped­ance mic input. (This is the sit­u­a­tion when you con­nect a bal­anced cable direct­ly to a recorder that doesn’t have an XLR input.) A trans­former looks like a con­nec­tion adapter and costs about $15. One con­sid­er­a­tion is that it may add noise to the sig­nal, par­tic­u­lar­ly from light dim­mer switch­es that are in the record­ing vicinity.

side­bar Not the Same

Don’t use a 3‑pin to 1/4‑inch jack adapter as a sub­sti­tute for a trans­former; it’s not the same.

In a sys­tem, you need dif­fer­ent cables between dif­fer­ent devices and dif­fer­ent con­nec­tors on the cables. Some­times it can get very com­plex. You have to use adapters to change one con­nec­tor into anoth­er connector.

The rule to remem­ber is to use high qual­i­ty cables as short as pos­si­ble with as few con­nec­tions (and adapters) as pos­si­ble. Each con­nec­tion and adapter may add unwant­ed noise to the sig­nal. Always use bal­anced (XLR) cables for pro­fes­sion­al mics, and shield­ed cables for all else. Mark­ertek (http://markertek.com) will make cables to your spec­i­fi­ca­tions with the prop­er con­nec­tors you need at each end (for a rea­son­able price).

Other Equipment

You can use stu­dio sound equip­ment such as a lim­iter, com­pres­sor, gate, equal­iz­er, or hybrid to accom­plish cer­tain audio refine­ments or enable spe­cial­ized uses, but I don’t rec­om­mend them. They are bulky, come with time-con­sum­ing learn­ing curves, and often require com­plex cable hook-ups that make them not worth the trou­ble. Spend your mon­ey else­where. Note that some mics and recorders have some of these capa­bil­i­ties built in.

Studio

With a dynam­ic mic you can find a qui­et place and record. Pick a well padded room with plen­ty of car­pet­ing, soft fur­ni­ture, cur­tains, no echo, and no ongo­ing loud nois­es from out­side, and your record­ing will sound like it was made in a stu­dio. You may need to turn off the heat­ing or air con­di­tion­ing while record­ing to avoid pick­ing up unwant­ed back­ground noise. But you don’t need a stu­dio with a dynam­ic mic.

With a con­denser mic you need more. Some peo­ple use a walk-in clos­et where lots of clothes hang to dead­en ambi­ent sound and keep out back­ground noise. Oth­ers clear out a reg­u­lar clos­et and install acousti­cal wall cov­er­ings to accom­plish the same. In oth­er words, they set­up a mini-studio.

You can also pur­chase a mini-stu­dio in var­i­ous sizes from desk­top to full height. Or you can build a mini-stu­dio. Sim­ply make a frame out of inex­pen­sive PVC pip­ing big enough for you and a floor mic stand or a small table and then drape lots of inex­pen­sive blan­kets over the frame. As a last resort use a well padded room (see above) or a nor­mal room with car­pet­ing, blan­kets over the win­dows, and blan­kets on the walls.

In oth­er words, if you use a con­denser mic, use an expen­sive one to jus­ti­fy the effort to fash­ion a stu­dio. Oth­er­wise use a dynam­ic mic.

Editing Software

You will need to use audio edit­ing soft­ware to process your record­ings into pre­sentable audio. Most such soft­ware is easy to use to do the basics, and you shouldn’t need to do more than basic edit­ing. The edit­ing is the final step in the audio workflow.

There’s no short­age of good audio edit­ing soft­ware. Audi­tion (Adobe), Sound Forge (Sony), and Audic­i­ty are old favorites, and Audac­i­ty is free­ware. But check out oth­er com­pa­ra­ble edit­ing soft­ware too.

Laptop

You can use your lap­top as a recorder. But what about qual­i­ty? Well, lap­tops range in price from $250 to $3,500. Thus, you can assume that the sound sys­tems with­in lap­tops also range quite a bit in qual­i­ty. The chips for dig­i­tal sound sys­tems are so inex­pen­sive now, how­ev­er, that you can find high qual­i­ty sound even in inex­pen­sive lap­tops. To plug your dynam­ic mic direct­ly into a lap­top, you may need an imped­ance trans­former and a con­nec­tion adapter.

One poten­tial prob­lem with a com­put­er sound sys­tem is noise. A dig­i­tal recorder doesn’t have mov­ing parts, and its elec­tron­ics are devot­ed to just record. A com­put­er has mov­ing parts, not the least of which is the disk dri­ve. In addi­tion, it has a rich array of elec­tron­ics that have noth­ing to do with record­ing. This all adds up to poten­tial noise that may affect the qual­i­ty of your recording.

Podcasting

You might note that I’ve not men­tioned pod­cast­ing, which has been very pop­u­lar for the last decade. Man­u­fac­tures make audio equip­ment just for pod­cast­ing. For instance, they make micro­phones that you can plug direct­ly into the USB port on a com­put­er. No muss and no fuss with spe­cial cables or con­nec­tors. I have no way to eval­u­ate such equip­ment, because I’ve nev­er used it. But I have lis­tened to dozens and dozens of pod­casts, and many put out sound that’s below pro­fes­sion­al quality.

You can set your­self up with pod­cast­ing equip­ment for two-thirds of what min­i­mal pro­fes­sion­al audio equip­ment will cost you. How­ev­er, you may be dis­ap­point­ed with the sound. Whether you can achieve pro­fes­sion­al record­ing excel­lence with low-end pod­cast­ing equip­ment is a lit­tle iffy, but if you’re on a bud­get, you might give it a try.

That is not to claim, how­ev­er, that all pod­cast­ers use pedes­tri­an pod­cast­ing equip­ment. Many use pro­fes­sion­al equip­ment and pro­duce a pro­fes­sion­al sound.

What I Use

My record­ing sys­tem is sim­ple. I use either an Audio Tech­ni­ca ATM41a or a Shure SM7b mic. I con­nect either with an XLR cable to a Mack­ie 402-VLZ3 mix­er. I con­nect from the mix­er to an Olym­pus PCM LS-10 dig­i­tal recorder via two XLR male connectors/cables joined into one 3.5mm 3‑pole female con­nec­tor. To that I add a cable with a male 3.5mm 3‑pole con­nec­tor at each end.

I record on a small, stur­dy, fold­ing table with a met­al desk­top mic stand placed on top of a rub­ber mouse pad. I mount the recorder on a small cam­era tri­pod. If I use the ATM41a mic, I attach a pop fil­ter to the mic stand.

This sys­tem not only works well at home and the office but also on the road. I usu­al­ly sit in an office chair unless the one avail­able is too squeaky; then I sit in any noise­less chair avail­able. Or I oil the squeaky office chair. WD-40: you can’t record with­out it.

The author of these arti­cles, Joseph T. Sin­clair, is the author of twen­ty How To books pub­lished by nation­al publishers.

For low-cost non-exclu­sive reprints rights for these arti­cles, con­tact sales@AppworthMedia.com.