>>675552OP what kinds of sounds do you want to get? Do you want stationary ambience to capture a place, or are you looking to home-in on individual sounds (i.e. a bird, a frog, etc)?
Also what's your budget?
Overall I think these anons have the right starting point
>>675808 >>675820Get yourself a handheld recorder to get started with. They tend to have a lot of handling noise so get a shockmounted handle or just stick it on a cheep little tripod. You'll need a windmuff for it as well. The mics in those things are nice and sensitive, but they're highly susceptible to handling noise and wind. Now if you want to collect isolated sound effects you'll want to look into a shotgun mic or a parabolic mic, as has been mentioned. Do you know anyhting about audio and microphones at all? Because there are lots of differences between shotgun, parabolic, cardioid, and omnidiretional microphones, not just in how directional they are but also in their sensitivity, frequency response, proximity effect, handling noise, mic techniques you can use them for, etc. You kinda have to find a broad starting point (pickup a handheld recorder with a pair of cardioid mics on it) and then learn what you need from there.
Here's a recording I did with just the onboard cardioid mics of my Tascam DR-40 (and windmuff!)
https://clyp.it/psahjlz4And here's one with my omni mics and Jecklin disk rig:
https://clyp.it/xkljs003Here's one with my binaural sphere mic:
https://clyp.it/zcdlyudkI also have a shotgun and a parabolic mic, but I've found very little use for them... I should try to record at least a decent demo of them. I just don't like to record mono generally.
