From the July 1989 issue of Radio And Production

Tips & Techniques

Portable Digital Studio

by Jerry Vigil

How many times have you been in the middle of producing a spot or promo and had to stop everything to get a simple voice track from someone? Maybe you sent the talent over to your dub center or auxiliary studio to lay the voice track, only to find that room busy dubbing music. The introduction of R-DAT portable recorders has opened a door to new possibilities when it comes to getting voice tracks and even sound effects.

Sony and Panasonic are two companies, that we know of, who offer the new portable R-DAT recorders. With a good mike, these recorders can give you pure digital recordings of voice tracks from anywhere you want, and you don't have to tie up an 8-track studio to get them. Of course, your studio is probably soundproofed very well, but there are several "dead" spots in the average radio station that can be used to record a voice track. Find a quiet office in your station, preferably one with drapes and carpeting. Have the announcer face the drapes to avoid reflections off the wall. Using a good mike and proper level settings, more than adequate voice tracks can be obtained this way.

An even better use of the portable R-DAT is for "on the scene" voice tracks. If you're doing a "man on the street" spot or promo, step outside your studios to get the tracks; you won't get a more realistic sound of traffic in the background than the actual sound in a natural mix with the voices involved. And don't forget...this is a digital recording, so you can bank on the fact that the track will be much cleaner than any old portable cassette deck you've used like this before.

The portable R-DAT is probably the best way to record your own sound effects. Take it to a club to record a few minutes of that atmosphere or to a restaurant or office. You can build your own library of digital sound effects this way, and they will probably sound better than the effects on that old library you've been using for years. Plus, balanced XLR mike inputs are available on some models for stereo recording.

Even if you have to buy a $500 mike, you can have this portable digital studio for around $2000. (We understand prices are dropping on some models.) Don't worry that it won't get used much; you'll be using it to replace that old cassette deck that's about to fall apart from overuse!

ITC-99s: Usage & Maintenance

Last month we offered some basic maintenance and usage tips for the ITC-99 cart machine. Ken Fine, one of our technical consultants, read the article and described another problem that can occur with the 99 series cart machines. Ken had just fin-iced repairing an ITC-99B with this very problem.

When the ELSA function sets the azimuth of the playback head, it is actually moving the head. After enough usage, this movement can loosen the wires attached to the tape head. In the case with Ken, the right channel of the unit went completely out. All connections on the rear were checked. The cards inside the machine were jiggled, hoping to tighten up a loose con-section. After moving the machine around a bit, it was tested again. This time the right channel was working, but it only took a couple of ELSA runs to lose the right channel again. It was then that the head wires were checked and found loosened from the head. Keep this one in mind should you lose a channel and the simple solutions don't work.

Voice, Music, and EQ

In a recent article "THE VOICE & THE EQ" (May 1989), we discussed some basic principles of EQ and how it is used on the voice. One of the uses is to boost upper mid frequencies of the voice to help get it to punch through a busy piece of music. There is another way to get the same result without EQ-ing the voice.

In a busy piece of music you might have horns, electric guitars, heavy snares, and other instruments that play around with frequencies close to that of the human voice. If you don't wish to boost frequencies on the voice to make it punch through, you can just as easily CUT frequencies in the music to create a "notch" for the voice to fit in. The frequencies to play with are generally in the 3kHz to 6kHz range. As with any tip, experiment with the settings! ◙