Make a Zoom F6 “Handy”

Friday, February 3rd, 2023

I’ve owned many examples of recorders from the Zoom Corp H series, the recorders Zoom calls “handy.” These are battery powered recorders with attached mics and SD card storage. Zoom has offered models from the H1 to the H8 with “N” and “Pro” upgrades along the way for some of the devices. The great majority of my slack key and Hawaiian music videos have audio that was captured on one of these Zoom Handy Recorder models. I set out to see how “handy” I could make my Zoom F6 so I could enjoy the advantages of this new recorder with the convenience of the older ones.

Although the H series recorders can be handheld, they also offer some sort of tripod attachment, which I basically always use. Fortunately the F6 also has a tripod mount option, so that’s where I started. I pulled out an inexpensive light weight camera tripod and attached the F6.

To attach mics I started by plugging a pair of Line Audio Omni1s through an adapter and directly into the F6. Then I fastened the optional male camera mount accessory to the top of the recorder, so with some adapters I used that to put a mic bar atop the F6. I used the mic bar to mount an X-Y pair of Shure KSM141 mics in cardioid.

Let’s look at the video to get a better idea of how the rig came together:

After all the rigging and adapting I was ready to play a little bit of “Salomila” slack key into these two mic arrays. You’ll have to jump to 286 seconds to skip over the hardware and get to the music.

I’ve continued to experiment with different mics and attachment methods. I’m not there yet, but I hope I’ll be able to develop a rig that is just as “handy” as my H6 but have the quality and convenience of the F6.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2023 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Recording. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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About the Blog

    Howdy, my name is Fran Guidry and this is my Homebrewed Music blog.

    I play Hawaiian slack key guitar and recorded my solo acoustic CD at home. Most of the recording information I find on the internet seems focused on bands, drums, multitracking, and so on but my main focus is recording solo acoustic guitar. Lately I’ve been enjoying video recording along with audio, so that shows up in the blog as well.

    I’m also a guitar nut. I love big ones and little ones, handmades and factory guitars, cheap ones and expensive ones. So I’ll be sharing the fun of exploring guitars as well, along with the challenges of amplifying acoustic guitars for live performance.

    Welcome!

Philosophy

    My recording philosophy is pragmatic, skeptical, not super critical. After all, the performance is by far the most important component of a track, and every aspect of any recording is a matter of taste.

    But I do like to know “about stuff.” Back in hifi days I learned about double blind testing. I learned that we humans can easily hear differences that don’t really exist. The more I’ve learned about our human auditory system, the more I’m skeptical of what people say they hear, especially if they claim that a particular microphone or preamp or cable has some magical property.

    I’ve only been recording since 2001, and when I started I found the usual places on the internet. I sought advice and accepted it, thought I would improve my recordings by using more expensive equipment. It didn’t work.

    Two things that did seem to lead to better recordings were experience and room treatment. Getting an appealing sound is the combination of many small details, and learning those details only comes from experience. Amd the sound of the recording space is obviously a big factor.

    I’ve only recorded seriously using digital technology, but I remember trying to record rehearsals and gigs back in analog days. I don’t have any nostalgia for analog recording and playback systems at all. I think even low end digital systems can capture marvelous recordings. So when I look at gear, I look for good specs: low noise, broad flat frequency response, wide dynamic range, low distortion. I’m not interested in colorful components, mics and preamps with a sound, I want the sound to be the sound of my guitar.

    But the last word is that I’m just learning and I hope you find something useful in my posts.