KONTRALIHT LIVE SESSIONS / using the Zoom H5 for field recording

Hey! It's Monday and that means another intense weekend has passed. I played two crazy gigs with Moskau

and with Trobecove Krušne Peći

(there are still no videos of the gig on Friday but here's a video of a gig we played a few weeks ago in Slovenia just so you get the idea..)

and it's now time to get back to work. Recently, a friend of mine decided to quit his job and start his own business. He just wasn't happy with the job he had - it was too time consuming and he felt he should try to make a living doing what he loves and what he does best and that's PHOTOGRAPHY and MUSIC VIDEO PRODUCTION. It's a tough call to just quit your steady job nowadays but it can be done and if you really enjoy your work and put all your effort into it, people are bound to recognize it, appreciate it and pay you money for it. Anyway, the general idea between the two of us is to combine my Simple Solution Studio and his Kontraliht photography and music video production firm into a business that would cover the production of audio-visual material. He would do the visual part and I would do the sound. The idea is simple: get as much artists as you can, both new and emerging acts and those those who have been around for a while and film them in different locations. Much of the live sessions today are made in the same session room because it's quicker and easier to get things done - you already have your equipment set up, you know how the place sounds like and what it looks like, you can control the environment (for example, you can manipulate the lights or find the best place to set up the drums to make sure they'll always sound great), but the set back is that everyone always kind of looks and sounds the same. We want to record everyone on a different location because we believe that the environment of the performance has an effect on the performance itself. In other words, performing live music is always a two-way process. The place of the performance dictates, in a way, the very performance. Playing a tune in a very small and intimate room with little light will make you play it more intimately than doing the same thing in a large hangar with tons of reverb. Recording at night isn't the same for the performer as it is playing early in the morning. What we want to do is to find a specific location for each individual artist, the one that suits the artist's sensibility and emotion the best. We wanted to test our concept and the best way to do it is to try it (on) ourselves. We decided I should do one of the songs from my upcoming solo album and Bojan would choose the location and film the entire thing. Since the only thing I had with me was my old-very-out-of-tune guitar, I decided to do a rendition of ''On death & Other Problems'' with a stripped-down acoustic arrangement. So, given the context of the song, the lyrics and the guitar in question (https://steemit.com/life/@grobens/my-world-war-ii-guitar-and-how-it-came-to-life-again), we opted for an old, out of use Jewish cemetery just outside of town. The cemetery has been long out of use and it's now a testament of a turbulent time. The entire place is now a World War II historical monument and it has been preserved as it was left more than 70 years ago.

(here's us filming on location)

Anyway, we wanted to bring as little equipment as we can and we also wanted to capture the sound of the location as it is - we wanted to get an organic sound of the location as well as the most organic sound of my voice and my guitar on that location as possible. After some thinking, we decided to only use a ZOOM H5 recorder. A Zoom H5 recorder is a handy little thing that can be used to record just about anything just about anywhere in high quality.

The device records high quality audio and it is very easy to use. It has two microphones placed in a stereo recording position (but you can also plug in your own mics if you have them via the two XLR inputs) and it records sound in .wav format. All you really need is a pair of headphones to be able to hear the sound you want to record and get the input levels right. Once that's done, you simply press record and you're on your way. The cool thing is that the ZOOM will capture all the ambient sounds pretty much in the same way your own ears would so the sound you hear feels relly natural and you get the feeling you are on location. The other cool thing is that it has a lot of warmth which also makes the sound feel more real. The only thing to consider when using the ZOOM is that, although it captures the ambience, it is somewhat directional meaning you need to turn the recorder in the direction of the sound you want to capture to record it properly. That means the ZOOM had to be placed somewhere near where I was standing, pointing in the way of my guitar and my voice. That way the sound we wanted to record would be clear and present and the ambient sounds would be somewhere in the background as they are in real life (because your ear lobes also direct the sound into your ear the same way the ZOOM does). After not more than a few takes, we got it right! So, here is the final product:

(try to watch it in HD if you can).

Now, even though this was sort of a test run for what we plan to do in the future, I am delighted with the result. The video looks amazing and the sound is very warm and organic (we didn't even mix it, it was left as it was recorded). I'm glad we did this because now we know we can do it and we know it looks and sounds just as it's supposed to. I am also glad I did this because the location really had an impact on my performance and on the way I sort of felt the song. I never felt this song the way I did right then and there and this is probably my favorite rendition of this song up to date. So, I'm really looking forward to doing more of this in the future because there are endless possibilities - I just love to imagine all these different artists performing their art on all these different and interesting locations. I think it will really be fun but it will also be a challenge and there are still a lot of things to learn along the way. As usual, feel free to comment on everything and I'll make sure to reply! Talk to you soon!