Ben Stone, the podcaster known as The Bad Quaker, is a friend of mine. Aside from my wife, and Neema Vedadi, Ben is my best friend, which is despite the fact that I’ve never met him. We talk on the phone several times a week for hours at a time. And he even fills in for Neema on the Freedom Feens Live on the rare occasion that Neema can’t make it.

My first contact with Ben was writing him the following e-mail, about a year ago:

Hi Ben, this is Michael Dean of the Freedom Feens. I really dig your cast, and it’s great information. But the audio quality isn’t very good. I’m willing to do free consulting work with you to help you make it better. I do this because I care, and because your message is so important that it shouldn’t be muddled in sub-standard audio quality.

Ben took my advice and improved his sound a lot over the coming months. It was a combination of getting better gear, and getting better at using it. I’m proud of Ben for many things, including the shining fact that, of anyone in liberty, he deserves the “most improved sound” award.

One of my suggestions to him was to get a Zoom H2 “studio on a stick” for recording mobile interviews away from home.

He did. That’s why I was appalled at the audio quality of some of the interviews he recorded at the NH Liberty Fest last month. He recorded some of them in a cement-walled fire escape, apparently with his mouth and his interviewee’s mouth not very close to the Zoom’s internal mics. And to make matters worse, people were walking through the hallway, opening a heavy door that made a scraping sound that sounded like someone removed your spine and ran it on a blackboard.

There’s a very simple solution for recording away from home and getting good audio: do it in a car. In today’s five-minute podcast, you’ll hear an intro recorded in my home, then an excerpt of Ben recording a horrible-sounding interview on a Zoom H2 with the brilliant Kevin McKernan. Then for contrast, my wife and I recording beautiful sound on a Zoom H2 in our car.

Modern cars are MADE to sound proof and sound condition. They are literally a vocal booth on wheels. I know it’s cold in New Hampshire in February, but sometimes ya gotta suffer for your art. And Kevin said it wasn’t so cold that they couldn’t have gone into a car, and he and Ben both wish they’d thought of it.

Other options for recording remotely at a convention, if you can’t use a car, would be a hotel room, an unused conference room (screw permission, just do it!), or even an empty convention hall. While convention halls are large, they usually have carpeted floors, & sound-absorptive walls and ceilings. In other words, record interviews ANYWHERE EXCEPT A CONCRETE FIRE ESCAPE HALLWAY WITH PEOPLE WALKING IN AND OUT.

Another thing that could make for even better live interviews with the Zoom H2 would be an external mic with a cardioid (or better yet, super-cardioid) pickup pattern. The Zoom has a pretty wide pickup pattern. A tighter mic would pick up less background noise, no matter where you are recording.

Ben’s audio, and my audio, were given the same normalization (“Speech” pre-set in SoundForge.)

I asked Ben’s permission to use his one-time bad example as a good example of how to do better. And in the teaching-hospital liberty-mission spirit, he said “Sure.”

And after his ranting about the Ron Paul vs. RonPaul.com thing, what could he say? “NO MICHAEL, YOU MAY NOT USE MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY!!!!!!” lol.

Worms.

–Michael W. Dean