So you’re out on the road, or jam­ming in a friends base­ment or sit­ting in a park strum­ming away and you want to record the sparkly bits of music that flow forth. Time was that you  might have had a portable  cas­sette recorder to cap­ture your bril­liance. These days a host of tools exist, with a host of fea­tures for musi­cians on the go to do field recording.

For those who don’t have a USB mic, or have a favourite micro­phone that you want to use for lap­top record­ing check out this USB to Mic adapter. This lit­tle thing is about as small as it gets for a mic pre-amp and con­verter. It even has hard­ware mon­i­tor­ing. 16 bit 48K/44.1KHZ Sam­pling, con­den­sor or dynamic.

Eschew the lap­top for the palm­top stu­dio. It’s like a mini-recorder on steroids minus the small testicles.

TASCAM DP-004

• Tas­cam DP-004
• Boss Micro BR
• Zoom MRS-8
• Sonar V-Studio 100
• Fos­tex MR-8 MkII

For­get the micro cas­sette. Once the province of jour­nal­ist and busy exec­u­tives the mini-recorder has gone beyond the mere note-taking duties of its ances­tors. Take your pick of any of these full fea­tured hand-held recorders:

• Zoom H4 or the cheaper Zoom H2
• M-Audio Micro­track II
• Tas­cam GT-R1 (For bass and gui­tar, includes tuner and metronome, amp sim­u­la­tion and effects)
• Edirol R09HR
• Sony PMDC50

Here are  great field­guides  on field record­ing from The Ver­mont Folk­life Center.

The new crop of sub-laptops that are crop­ping up are cheap, light, and small. Per­fect for the musi­cian on the go. They don’t take up much room in your gig-bag and when you’re haul­ing your out­fit the last thing you want is more weight. Check out this arti­cle on record­ing music with Linux on an Asus EEE. I recall that some time ago banks were just giv­ing these away if you opened an account. I have use an EEE at work and can tes­tify that it is tiny. Don’t for­get to see the related links too.

Oade Broth­ers Audio is a place to go for dig­i­tal field recorders, though more for the journalist/archiver/sound guy than the musi­cian. Still, these are beefy things with pro­fes­sional power. Per­fect for record­ing that drum­ming cir­cle on the men’s-getaway-weekend-retreat-extravaganza.

For you iPodists out there, Ale­sis has the Pro­Track which you can pick up here. Also Belkin has the GoS­tu­dio which you can also get here at a 46% sav­ings. Don’t for­get the soft­ware side of things (iProRecorder, Rectools2)

With the plethora of portable record­ing solu­tions avail­able you have lit­tle excuse for not archiv­ing your music, wher­ever you are. So next time you’re at a jam ses­sion be sure you have some­thing to cap­ture the spon­ta­neous awe­some­ness or risk los­ing it in the mists of time.

Tags: Recording

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Of Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.