The Broom Cupboard Studio
A ‘rare vintage’ BBC microphone
Week 2 of Editing Month and I am pleased to report that I have been scripting and editing and the Willow tree episode is almost there. I have also fixed to record another episode which will tell the story of some very beautiful and special plant tattoos.
All this has brought into focus my recording studio! Over my 30+ years in BBC radio, I saw many studios - some were huge, there was one with a grand piano (for Radio 3), some were tiny - the broom cupboard studio based in the County Council offices in Chester and used by Radio Merseyside. In the ones of the basement of Broadcasting House, you could faintly detect the rumble of the Underground. But none of them looked quite like the space I have been using over the past months…my office. It’s quite a good size, big window beside me and lots of hard surfaces ie desk tops. In a moment of revelation I thought maybe I needed to find my own broom cupboard space.
Then there’s the microphone I have been using. If you google the AKG D130 it’s described as ‘exceptionally rugged’ and ‘often used for reporting’. I also saw it described as ‘rare vintage’, I was slightly perturbed by that description. So I spoke to Phil. Phil along with Bill and Pete (and later Jonathan) lived in the Engineer’s office at Radio Merseyside. It was the place you went to get your Uher repaired (now we’re really talking vintage, as in portable reel to reel machine) or advice on how to record something. They also issued you with your Radio Car licence following on your training in the art of driving said car and learning how to put up the mast - never near overhead electrical cables. I digress - Phil gave me some very good advice on the best way to find and equip a broom cupboard for the purposes of recording. We also talked microphones.
So this weekend the task is to record using vintage mic and new mic * and in ‘office studio’ and ‘broom cupboard studio’. The idea is to send some unlabelled recordings to Phil for blind testing. I will let you know the results next week. *There might be a slight delay as on Friday, Amazon delivered a bag of cat litter instead of new microphone!
One question for the podcast crew. I have talked in past blogs about ‘the team’ and I met up with a new member this week. Maeve is helping to research where we can ‘market’ the podcast, where can we find potential listeners. She has lots of brilliant ideas and I’m sure over the coming months, I will be sharing them here. But one other thought we discussed was the naming of episodes. One plant can have many names. If you want to see an example of this look no further than Myles Steward Irving’s notes on the name of the Passionflower. The system of using a plant’s Latin name as opposed to the common name, gets around this because wherever you are in the world everyone uses the same name and is therefore talking about the same plant. It is genius but I would be the first to admit that until I started studying for my RHS level 2, this world of Latin plant names was foreign to me. However given this podcast is tracking plants as they travel the world, Maeve made the very good suggestion that we use the Latin names. We’re not doing it to seem elitist or clever but to bring clarity and maybe also to start to open up that language of plant names to everyone who listens. So it could be Episode 3 - Salix Fragilis or Episode 5 - Passiflora.
I’d love to know your thoughts - does this put you off or make you curious or are you just not bothered - you just want to hear the story?
ps the patron saint of gardeners is Saint Faicre