space and equipment

Two more topics to digress on for this post!

Space: I am lucky, no I am blessed, to have a very strange neighbor. The house next to ours is the house where his parents lived, and he grew up. He actually lives across the street from us, and owns the house next to us. I haven't been in the house next door, but evidently, it's the same as it was when his parents died. This means that the house is quiet, except for when Fred sets off fireworks. He likes to do this, but I like him anyway because we're the same temperment.

Anyway, it was MOSTLY quiet in a our back bedroom, since that's the room furthest from the road and closest to the "no one lives here" house. Sometimes, Fred's friend Jason, uses the that driveway to move stuff around with big machines, but generally not until after he starts drinking (around 9am).

Well, back to the space. I decided on the back bedroom as the place to record, knowing that was the best option. In general the quieter, the better. You can't do anything about ghetto-copters (learned that too).

Something else you never think about is the fact that the microphone needs to be close to your mouth, and the laptop. Close but not too close, the water to drink close but not close enough to spill all over yourself, the book and the laptop.

Eventually, I'll add a picture of the set up to this page.


Now let's think about equipment. I'm used to recording in VERY expensive sound studios, where all you do is saunter up to the microphone to speak.

I asked some friends if they had a microphone to spare, but no one did. We saved up some money, and I bought this wonderful microphone:

http://www.bluemic.com/snowball/

I think the best part about it is that it's multi use. It has a switch for multi or single directional, so it's good for podcasting or single reading.

In addition, the price was VERY reasonable--- only $80.00 on Amazon.

Next, I needed a copy of the book that wasn't the library's. That was pretty cheap too $15.00.

Finally, the laptop. We have two of them, A Dell Inspiron that I use that we've had to replace the hard drive twice on (Runs Linux only because of it's unreliability), and Vince has a HP TX 1300.

Finally, software is what I needed. I found a version of Audacity online, and downloaded it onto my computer.

You'll hear more about troubleshooting all of the problems on another post. Suffice it to say, that's all we needed!