I used to record my fiddle lessons on a little cassette recorder that I picked up in a drug store.
At some point I switched over to a digital recording thing I purchased in an office supply store.
It made no difference.
Both recorders made anything musical sound gosh awful.
One day my husband happened in while I was trying turn the B part of some tune into an Earworm so I could put it on my fiddle and his remark was, “Jeez! That sounds terrible! I thought you’d made much more improvement than that with your fiddle playing.”
Then I told him it wasn’t me playing the tune.
It was one of my teachers.
Shortly after that my husband bought me an iPod and then a Zoom for recording classes and sessions. If I’m going to be someplace where I can haul stuff in and set up for a while, the Zoom is fine.
My iPod with a Belkin microphone fits in my fiddle case however.
The talk about iPod/MP3s in PROCTology forum got me to wondering what you all carry around with you for recording live music in the moment, especially those of you who wouldn’t be caught dead being seen with an iPod/MP3 kind of thing.
I’m not talking about the massive reel to reel you might have set up in your home studio.
What’s in your pocket, your purse, your case for all those by chance new tunes you might happen to hear played somewhere and want to learn?
For a long time I used a Sony Walkman. This had very good sound, and had a good stereo mic, but the files were in Sony’s proprietary file format, so I had to replay the output as analog into the sound card on my PC and record that digitally. The resulting sound quality was quite good for a field recording, but having to re-record everything was a chore.
I now use a Roland Edirol, which I bought used from a member of this board. This allows me to record digitally as .wav’s. The sound quality is fine for field recordings, but having everything recorded digitally, ready to be played or burned directly to CD makes my life so much easier.
The Edirol has an inbuilt microphone, can record directly as mp3 and gives great quality. it is very easy to use, great for sessions or concerts. Then you connect it to a PC or Mac via USB and just drag and drop the files where you want them. I import it all to iTunes then, and either burn CDs (for my car) or listen to the files on my iPod.
(there’s much talk about iPods these days, suspicious suspicious … )
I use an iRiver, which can record direct to MP3. When I can justify it (i. e., not for a long time), I’ll get something, maybe an Edirol, which has a more user-friendly interface.
I use a Sony voice recorder with 8 mb of memory [yes that’s mega not giga] and a USB hatch. File format is the funky Sony DVF format. It is about 4 years old and I have done hundreds of recordings over the years.
Sound quality with a mic is about that of FM radio. Works great for fielding recording, where background noise and room acoustics are almost always more limiting than sampling rate, or the mic.
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