Tough love, but here it goes. Throw the Zoom in the trash (or sell it on eBay). Don't be a zoomie if you really want to tape. Buy an M10, a battery box, and some B3s. If you skip the battery box for now, you can still make good tapes. One of our resident cable makers can help with terminating the B3s in a mini plug and can do the mod for high SPL situations.
Since I have an M10 and a show I wanna tape(full disclosure, I'm not a taper, just mostly got patches in 80s/90s), a few questions. Trade Friendly band Wishbone Ash playing Ram's Head in Annapolis in Sept. It's possible I could get a board patch according to DIME post of a W.A. show. I was thinking of the M10 on the table. Now considering bringing my DA-P1 for the board patch. Or taking this post suggestions of getting a battery box, B3s and using that at my table. I taped Bruce Cockburn at same venue on the table straight to the external M10 mics and it came out ok, but thats acoustic. I now gather using just the M10 stand alone may not be the best idea. What about getting board patch into the M10? It's possible I could borrow mics (Neumanns) from a taper friend. Not sure what to do.
If you don't know what you're doing, borrowing "some Neumanns" is going to have a steeper learning curve and a lot more gear involved. The board patch will require you to have an accommodating sound engineer at the club who will be willing to set that up for you; it'll also require you to have the proper cables, which will mean you need XLR cables with XLR-M to 1/4" male and XLR-F to RCA adapters to go into the board (depending on the inputs) plus dual XLR-F to stereo mini to plug into the M10's line in. Bad news is, depending on many factors, that SBD feed may not sound like it does in the room; in most smallish rooms the feed is light on stuff that you can hear easily in the audience, like guitars (because their amps play loud).
Buying some nice mics like B3s or Church Audio plus a battery box and running them into the deck is relatively the easiest; it's the same as using the internal mics except that you plug that stuff into the M10's line in. Get the mics as high up as possible, aim them at the stacks, etc. etc.
The lowest cost option is to buy the necessary cables and adapters for the SBD patch; the option least likely to get screwed up is the buying mics option. It doesn't really matter. Just give a whirl and have fun. It's likely that a first time out won't go well, but you'll learn something. If it does go well, then more power to you!
Also: The M10's internals aren't ideal, but they aren't so horrible either. If you're at a table nice and up close (but not too close, if the band has vocals that come from the PA) they'll do alright. But yes, as others already said, you'll make much better recordings doing something else.
Topic: Zoom H2N advice regarding concerts (Read 34717 times)