I finally retired my “BIC Lighter” — the iRiver IFP795 mp3 player that I used for over five years to take a tap off the mixing board or headphone amp to record every Project Mojo gig (nearly 600 of them to date). It was simple and worked good, but it’s getting old, tired and a little cranky — sometimes the buttons randomly swap functions. It’s also been left behind in the Windows world, back in XP-land, so off loading tracks relies on an equally old, tired and cranky Acer laptop.
I had tried a Creative Zen VPlus for a while but it wasn’t as reliable and if the internal battery ran down at a gig, I was SOL. After excessively eye-balling the latest generation of hand held recorders from all the usual suspects — Boss, Tascam, Sony, Olympus, M-Audio, Alesis, Roland, Eiderol, Korg, Zoom — and finally pulled the trigger on the Zoom H4n (http://bit.ly/fhFYKP).
Physically, the H4n is a lot bigger than the BIC Lighter, but it packs a boat load of functionality that I wanted specifically for live recording and recording work away from the studio stuff:
- Auto Start/Stop Record
- 1/4 inch & XLR inputs for line input from Board, Rack, Guitars, Keyboards, microphones, etc.
- 4-track input (2-line in; 2 mike in) for simultaneous direct & ambient recording at gig
- Multi-track recording for laying down tracks
- Mp3 & wave file formats up to 96kHz/24 bit
- Storage-A-Plenty (32 gig on SD card)
- Built-in Preview speaker
- AC power supply (Included!)
- Last, but Not Least – Runs on “AA” batteries like nearly everything else in my life from my Kodak Zi6 video recorder to my Cannon A520 digital camera to my Lightspeed ANR headset to even my Oral-B electric toothbrush
I got the unit last Friday and it passed the intuitive test, as I was able to record in all the modes readily and successfully without referring the manual (though it will come in handy).
Saturday I used it for the first time at a gig and both Lola and Jake agreed on the ride home that the sound was much better than the BIC Lighter – and that was in mp3 format, because I haven’t gotten the 32 gig SD card to gulp down audio wave files.
So far, so good . . . .
I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution Take a bow for the new revolution Smile and grin at the change all around Pick up my guitar and play Just like yesterday
Electron Alley 