One thing I hadn’t fully taken into consideration when getting my H6 is that aside from recording, it works great as a tiny mixer for headphone jams with up to three stereo devices. I got rid of my Mackie mixer a while back, but it turns out I can jam out with say two or three Volcas and the H6 and it’s a really compact setup. I just wish it had onboard reverb and delay.
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Beautiful afternoon here in SW Indiana to do some recording. The park I’m at has a new water fountain array that I’m recording.
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I read through most of this thread and then found a sale on the H1n, then went and bought the accessories pack. I’m very happy with it although it is hard to handle without getting a lot of plastic noises into it. I was hoping the handle would take care of some of that but it doesn’t entirely keep it out. Still, I’s great for the price and just the right size to have around and record sampler food.
The feature I enjoy the most is that it becomes available as a hard drive for my iPad when connected through USB and CCK, and I can organize the recordings directly without needing a laptop. It also doubles as a stereo audio interface for the iPad. Fantastic!
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Yeah, I totally discounted the whole iOS connectivity thing, but by connecting it to GarageBand on my iPhone, I can run all sorts of effects for up to three stereo devices, monitoring through headphones with the H6.
Really compact setup, especially if you are just say jamming with a couple of small, battery powered devices. Not to mention you could record acoustic instruments with effects as well though the microphones.
I bought a pretty expensive Eventide Mixing Link a while back because I wanted to run my flute through a good condenser mic with guitar pedals (like delay and reverb). Since I’m not doing stage stuff, I could have saved myself a bunch of money by using iOS effects instead.
I find GarageBand a bit fiddly to use. I need to investigate a simpler recording app that can host effects.
There are a lot of really good apps for iOS to serve any purpose. Garage Band is very complete but it only scratches the surface of what’s possible in iOS these days. If you just want to multitrack record, Roland has an app called Zentracker which is free to try, and a DAW called Zenbeats. My personal favorite is AUM which is essentially mixer board that hosts effects, but you have to go hunting (and paying) for effects individually. It’s a whole universe. There are a few threads here in Elektronauts but the best forum for iOS music is https://forum.audiob.us/ . There’s a very complete list of apps in that website too.
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@dvvi Thanks very much. I had a look at Roland’s thing earlier, which looked great in terms of simple and clean, but I’m not sure if it hosts third-party effects (I just bought 5-6 yesterday). Looks like you might need a subscription service. If it does, that would be be pretty much ideal.
Hi there,
I’m also looking for a good field recorder, but for a specific purpose: recording movie sound, so basically it should get as much as possible - talks and ambience - with not too much noise.
I know it’s a lot to ask and I should get a static microphone and all.
But I had a H4n - that’s not working realiably anymore - and it did the job OK (quite some noise but OK).
So what I’m after is low signal-to-noise ratio, i.e. the best mikes I can get on such devices.
Has anybody any recommendation to make for this particular use case?
The Sony PCM D100 was well regarded as a solid contender for best signal to noise ratio as far as internal mics are concerned, recently discontinued. You could pick one up second hand, but I can’t vouch for how the OS is doing these days in terms of compatibility or how it interfaces with pc’s. Maybe do some searching on it and see how folks are going using it these days.
That said, nothing beats good mic technique as I’m sure u know, and you’d probably find most film sound relies on shotguns and boom arms and the like to get the mic as close to the source as possible - handy recorders tend to record more ambient general sound rather than direct sources. Further, a film soundtrack would tend to be a combination of foley sounds, ambient noises and close mic’d sources, arranged together into the sound design (not sure of your level of expertise on all this).
Otherwise, any modern recorder should do the job and the new TASCAM X8 above looks great.
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Thanks so much for the advice.
Actually, I don’t have any experience in this field at all 
Coming from a sond-oriented background, I was surprise to see how challenging it is to record audio for a movie, and how different it was from music recording.
There are very few spoken words in the movie I intend to shoot (it’s a test to enter a film making school) so I’m even considering recording in voice over. But I’ll still need to record ambience at one point :-/
Otherwise I’m considering using lavaliers for voices (Sennheiser ?) and a regular field recorder for ambience. Maybe I’ll just rent them if I can.
Ah, the context helps. Well, I say if you are at least trying to consider audio for the entrance test, that’s better than not thinking about it at all. In that case use whatever you can find (renting is a good idea, too. This is how pro’s roll in film, tbh) but try and be aware of things like wind noise, distorted levels, if lavalier then no noise from jewellery or clothing or things like that. Often, good audio is achieved just by giving care to it, and whoever is assessing the application should notice that detail.
Funnily enough, most movies will record actors speaking on set with a mic of some sort, but often dialogue is replaced by another studio recording after the fact - it’s called ADR.
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Yes, I was surprised to hear about that in the YT videos I watched on the topic. It seems the role of audio post-producer is on the rise. But it looks like such a hassle to deal with such projects!
(countless snips and bits needing to be put together, sample labelling nightmares, etc.)
Thanks for the useful advice 
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I ended up watching a couple of videos on AUM and it’s exactly what I was looking for (and a whole lot more). It was on sale for Black Friday, so I grabbed it. It’s much more intuitive to me than GarageBand, and since I’ll probably be sampling more from iOS in the future, there’s a lot of room to grow.
I was easily able to route the inputs on my Zoom H6 to different channels and assign different effects. I saved that session to use as a template, so it should be a lot quicker to get stuff down going forward. Thanks again. This adds a lot more functionality to my setup, so it was worth the investment.
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Very happy to hear it worked for you—welcome to the club!
Make sure to grab the free port of Plaits, Clouds, Rings, and Elements called Spectrum Bundle Synthesizer https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spectrum-synthesizer-bundle/id1467384251
And depending on what Electron box you use, you might find this app to transfer files from the iPad to the Digitakt and model:samples valuable (it’s a bit glitchy but it works most of the time) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1522995351
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Is anyone using a cassette recorder for field recording? It seem to me that it would completely solve the boot-up time problem, and a little bit of hiss adds character, right?
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Sure, it adds character. Not so easy to get rid of that character though.
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Both my Sony and Zoom recorders can wake from powersave mode nearly instantly. I think they both also have 30 second or so record buffers that they can “retroactively” record from.
If you love tapes, then by all means play with them. But the cheapest digital audio recorder will almost certainly be cleaner than the most expensive tape deck.
Now I’m interested. What models are they?
Sony M10 - no longer in production
Zoom H2n - cuts some bass, so not ideal for tasks other than field recording
Both take a pair of AAs and get 12+ hours of recording time on a pair. So when I’m traveling and recording ambient sound, I just leave the recorder in standby mode. Pull it out of standby to record something, and then let it go back to sleep.
If you happen to find an M10 for a decent price, be aware that the clock can’t keep time for more than a few weeks. A minor annoyance, but something to be aware of - if anyone offers a “broken” M10 because the clock won’t keep time, it is fine.
I probably bought the last new Sony PCM D100 on the net. They can still be found used but they’re not cheap. Still, if you can find one I advise you to grab it; they are not making them like that anymore. For anything better you’ll need to spend at least 2-3k euros on a Sound Devices rec and a pair of quality mics and who wants to carry those around?
Another handheld id recommend is a used Olympus LS-11.
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Thanks! I have a little Roland R-07, which makes lovely recordings, but it takes so long to boot that I end up using the Voice Memos app on my phone.