November 25, 2025
Some people seem lost in terms of what size of a space is needed. In my home, I am blessed with several playing locations, but I want to discuss the smallest space, my space where I practice and where I make my little videos for recording Free Bass educational tunes from the Borgstom books. I also want to kind of demo the level of quality that this space give me with some different mic placements.
The two events (playing educational pieces and practicing), benefit from being recorded and I want to discuss this little dedicated space and how it is set up and used.
FIrst, the size of the loation… it is TINY, we are looking at a size of 82″ deep by 91″ wide. This width and distance is just enough to take my Sony Handycam and capture a height of my waist to top of my head from a seated position. In other words, There is enough room for me to spread wide the bellows for long pulls and we can see from top of my head to my knees… perfect for that “intimately” close feel if I am making practice and educational videos. If left like this, I can use a 16:9 format from the background, which is incidentally the space occupied by 2 doors and a 21″ separation in between them.
Is this distracting? For this kind of case use, it is, but only slightly and not mission critical. If I want to improve on that, I have a clever idea in the wings that I can discuss a bit later.
So what is in that 82″X91″ space? Well, a chair with an accordion on it, across from that is an audio interface who’s headphone outputs go straight in to the stereo mic input of the camera. Since the audio goes straight from the audio interface to the camera, there is nothing to post process and nothing to sync (I touch on this more below).
The space’s depth is limited because there is a wall with the 2 aforementioned doors on one side, and the back of my main computer desk on the other. On top of that desk on this side is a 32″ Samsung television that serves as my main screen for displaying sheet music from the iPad or some free IPTV for those rare times I need some kind of small distraction.
A fast little hand drawn floor plan looks like this:
The above is the GENERAL idea of the basement floor plan, it is not to scale, but it gives a good idea of my setup. The area of concernis in the top left side. Given a hand drawn blow up of that area gives some dimensions:
A view from the camera side:
A view of the camera/audio interface:
What am I doing with this setup? Being lazy… lol. As mentioned earlier, the sound is captured from the mics, in to the audio adapter, shot out the headphone output in to the camera’s stereo mic input.
The results are not optimal. Even if I set the mic to manual levels, there is no way to 100% disable the AGC (automatic gain control). The best that this camera can do is disable all gain for sounds above -21db. That means my quiet sections are pushed up over 21db and then it stops. NOT IDEAL… but for most of my educational videos or practice videos… I don’t care so it is good enough.
Should I wish to do a serious recording, I simply press RECORD on th audio interface and record that audio in a much higher and cleaner/clearer quality that I can post process and sync to the file after working on it in post.
So, what kind of view and sound can we expect from this setup? It sounds just like this:
Please note, I’ve always said that for most microphones the sweet spot is somewhere between 2-3 feet away and that in some cases, depending on accordion, mics, recording device and room acoustics, that closer is better. What the picture doesn’t show is that when the mics are 43″ from the far wall, they are a mere 16″ away from the closest edge of the accordion. That is pretty close.
What I would next want to do is change the cardioid capsules for hyper-cardioid capsules, and it sounds like this with no other changes:
The stereo image is more defined and I plan to use these capsules as a default for this setup moving forward. Sound quality is nicely improved both my using Hyper-Cardioid capsules and spending some time with the file in Reaper.
So what did I take home today?
- My tiny space is more than adequate for the needs that I use it under.
- On the NW-410 mics with this accordion and conditions, the hyper-cardioid capsules work better.
- Distance is not as great a facter under these conditions, but keep it under 24 inches.
- My Morino is naturally louder on the right side than left.
- Without post processing… sound is not terrible, but not optimized.
- To get the best sound quality, record on the F4, put it through post process and sync it.
- This method for educational & practicing purposes, even if it is not optimal sound, serves just fine.
That’s it for now… enjoy!