Current Field Recording Kit

At the moment I'm doing a lot of field recording and recording at home using this rig above. On a sidenote this is because I'm currently without my zoom r16 as it's had to go for a repair. One of the preamps was cutting out intermittently but fair play to DV247 they arranged a courier and took it away for repair even though it was over a year since I bought it. Anyway I thought I'd stick a picture up and say a bit about my rig. I've got a few options for a recorder I have an old portable DAT (a sony D7) which still sounds gorgeous but is a bit of a faff to bounce stuff to the computer. My Boss micro BR which I still use (mainly with my guitar as a rehearsal/practice tool) but the newest kid on my block is the zoom h1. I'm pretty pleased with it...it's quick to boot and gets a decent sound through both the built in mics and through the preamp input.

So the picture shows;

Zoom H1 (center)

Diy stereo electret mics with fluffy windshields (top left)

My Senheiser PX100's -had these for years - held together with superglue and tape but still sound great (Bottom left)

Little square blue pouch containing spare micro SD cards I carry 3 8gb cards, and a couple of other cards I use as pen drives, this is attached to a clip and a micro sd reader (bottom centre)

Camera tripod for use with H1 (centre leftish)

My DIY Binaural microphones (see this post for how they're made) (top right)

USB pen drive...this is an old drive I don't use much anymore so it has a copy of my install of reaper on it (exact replica of the version I use on my pc's that can run straight of the pendrive on any windows pc)and also has a copy of Audacity portable on it. This is so I can do bits of work on my lunch hour using my works laptop on which they don't like us installing software. (top centre)

Neck lanyard and clip...this is so I can wear the H1 recorder round my neck when using the Binaural mics (usually under my jacket) (bottom)

Windscreen for H1 (bottom right)

Spare batteries (centre right)

All of this lives currently in one of these old nintendo gaming bags from the eighties! I went through a phase of buying up a lot of original gameboys for my chiptune adventures and ended up with a few of these. They're quite handy kit bags as the have 2 zipped layers and are well padded, they're obviously designed for kids though as the straps require a bit extra stitching in for adults!


I'd like to add a diy shockmount and grip for the H1 as it suffers from a lot of handling noise but my current diy shockmount isn't suitable as it would cover all the controls on the H1 if I used it....so stay tuned for that one. I'd also like to make a 40db pad as the preamp is a bit hot for line level and you end up turning down the level on the device your recording increasing the signal to noise ratio. I also want to build a little box with a 2 channel passive mixer for use with a mono mic as I've learnt a trick where you record a mono mic to the 2 stereo channels with one lower than the other meaning if the hotter channel peaks you have another lower track which won't have peaked.

So having typed all this I realised it may not be the most interesting post ever...but it's exactly the kind of post I really enjoy reading on other people sites. Feel free to post your feild recording kit list in comments!