Today was a pretty lazy Saturday and my girls wanted to put on a “singing show”. Usually I just sit on the couch and watch (after one of them charges me a pretend admission) but today I thought I would step it up a bit and let them loose with the Zoom H4n and my microphones.

It was a lot of fun. After turning the ZoomH4n on and then plugging in the Behringer XM8500 microphone into plug number one (held by the little tiara wearing princess on the left hand side), and the Audio-Technica AT2005USB into plug number two (held by the street smart hoodie wearing princess on the right hand side) I checked the levels and then started recording. For this I had the recording level set at around 80

The biggest challenge with four year olds and microphones is ensuring that they have them close to their mouth as much as possible so you can capture their voice consistently. My two in particular decided they wanted to throw some dance moves in which impacted the volume of the recording as they moved the microphones away from their mouths… but to be honest that doesn’t really matter does it!

After our puppy got tangled up in the XLR cables we decided to try singing using the built in stereo microphones on the ZoomH4n. After packing all the microphones and cables away, I sat with one of my daughters on the couch to record her tunes. The first thing to remember is that when you switch from external microphones to the built in microphones on the Zoom, you need to press the “Mic” button (the small red button on the left hand side of the Zoom in picture). Otherwise you will not capture any audio at all!

In this scenario where I had a very enthusiastic four year old, with the microphones so close to her mouth I needed to reduce the recording level down to about 40. Otherwise it was just hitting the limits when she was starting to belt out a tune!