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Recordist Paul Baldwin’s Techniques With Sanken Lavaliers, Shotguns

Production sound recordist Paul Baldwin’s credits include the Super Bowl, 60 Minutes, 20/20, 48 Hours, National Geographic and Cops. To capture sound most effectivly for "sit-down" interviews, Sanken prefers for using CS-1 short shotgun and the COS-11 lavalier.

Production sound recordist Paul Baldwin’s credits include the Super Bowl, 60 Minutes, 20/20, 48 Hours, National Geographic and Cops. To capture sound most effectivly for “sit-down” interviews, Sanken prefers for using CS-1 short shotgun and the COS-11 lavalier.

“I often use both a lavalier on the speaker and a shotgun on a boom, just out of the shot,” Baldwin explains. “I put the lav on track one and the shotgun on track two so that the editor can choose which works best. For example, someone who is soft-spoken might sound better with a boom, while someone with a loud voice would sound good with a lavalier.

Baldwin explains that “The COS-11 has so much bottom, you’d never believe it was a lavalier. You can hide it essentially in plain sight and it just sounds spectacular. I usually run it through a buttonhole or tape it just inside the collar where the V-neck meets so that it is out of sight, but not buried. If you have someone speaking, like Morley Safer or Mike Wallace, who have great timbre in their voices, it carries every bit of it. I own just about every lav ever made and the Sanken is the Rolls Royce of all the lavaliers. Everybody I know who does serious sit-down interviews prefers the Sanken.”

Baldwin continues about the Sanken CS-1 short shotgun: “It’s light, compact and inexpensive, with a nice, rich tone. I really like the fact that you can talk behind it and off-axis there is virtually no sound. It’s got a lot of presence and gives you a good amount of ambient sound.”

Working with the combination of a concealed lavalier and shotgun on a boom has proven to be a good combination for Baldwin. “I record with both and you can barely tell the difference between the two. It’s surprising that the gain is almost identical on the mixer.”

For more information, please go to www.sanken-mic.com.

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