Zoom H4

E got me a Zoom H4 a month or so back. It was $250 at Amazon. I've been digging it. The built in mics seem to do a very nice job.

Here's a pretty good review of the H4.

The coolest thing about the H4 is how it allows you to be creative and record that creativity very quickly. A big part of the killjoy for me with recording is the time it takes to set the gear up. That kind sucks the energy out of me. This thing lets me get down ideas in a format that's real listenable and requires virually no set up time. I realize that there are other flash recorders out there (and maybe some are better), but for the price and for what you get, I highly recommend this thing.

I've played around with the 4 track feature some and I've yet to get a new card (so I'm using the 128 MB SD card that came with it), but I've lately just been recording to stereo mp3 and have been very pleased. I've been running off rechargeable batteries and haven't seemed to have to recharge them that much.

I've also done some nature recordings which I will post later, but here's a couple of samples of improvisational music I just slapped down to see how it records with the internal mics (set at the lowest gain... so they are a bit quiet). There is no processing whatsover on these samples. They are record straight to mp3 and then dumped right to the web site.

This is a recording of our Hammond M3 using its internal speaker (not the motion sound):

Goofy Hammond M3 tune...

Here's me banging on our Tama drum kit (I know, I'm not really a drummer and I was just seeing how the Zoom would record it, so don't critic the playing... I already know it's horrible:

Goofy Drum track...

I may add more Zoom recorded tracks later....