Hearing things I want to record...

[slark238]

Every now and again, like 3-4 times a week, a tune will pop into my head, and I'll either hum it out, or if I am playing a guitar, start adding some music to it. Usually, I forget it within hours, but sometimes they stay with me or come back while playing.

Now, mind you, I am not a trained musician. I do not read music. I am no poet, nor lyricist, but a few of these tunes sound pretty darn good to me. And my wife, who finds it easy to critque anything I do, thinks so as well.

I'm not into making a second career here, but I would like to get a few of these down on tape, or digitial medium or something. I have gone to the Home recording.com (or something similar), and everytime I feel I have a decent idea of what to get gear-wise, somebody suggests another device to put in the line or whathaveyou.

I have two questions:

1) Do any of you semi-pros or pros out there recognize this afflicition I have of being bombarded with tunes? Or should I dial up Resthaven Glen and have the boys in the white coats swing on by...

2) Assuming I can hold off on the boys, what to do about the gear? I want something easy, quick, handelable by one person (me), yet high quality. Money is an object, but not a big one.

****, here comes another one! oh, wait its just Shastakovitch...

David

[ibmindless]

Stephen Foster is considered one of America's greatest songwriters. He wrote Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races, My Old Kentucky Home, Beautiful Dreamer, and many more in the mid 1800's. Foster carried a sketch pad wherever he went, as he was always thinking about songs. Whenever an idea, a scene, or phrase struck him, he would jot it down.

I try to do the same with a cheap Sony cassette recorder. So there's one idea...

[dahn8]

If you have a cell phone, you can call your own cellphone and record your thoughts/songs/etc... into your voice mailbox.

Dan

[woodenkings]

as everyone has mentioned i to kept alot of paper on me and around me and started a 1.5" binder. i started off recording on cassette also but with an inexpensive kareoke and a small hand held [regular size] cassette recorder.
i still use the recorder and have stepped up to a Tascam cassette recorder
-inexpensive [mkII].

[dthumb]

You might want to invest a couple of bucks in a mini voice recorder. The sound is not fabulous but, they're very convenient and inexpensive..pocketsize. Some of the better ones have a USB link so you can download the contents to your PC. Thats a pretty neat feature.

[utah]

If you just want to capture the idea, you've got some good suggestions already.

If you want to record the idea so that others want to hear your songs, well...that's a different ballgame.

Some recorders, like the Yamaha AW16G that I use have a quick loop sampler that makes it easy to just capture ideas that pop into your head for further development. When, you're ready to go full tilt on recording them, you've got a 16 track digital audio workstation ready to help you create. That unit is now around $800 US.

There's so many options as far as home recording goes, I couldn't list them all. Suffice to say, when it comes to home recording there's no limit to how you want to do it. There are dozens and dozens of good stand alone units out there, and hundreds and hundreds of PC based options as well.

[slewis]

An approach I take to this, and I know it isn't ideal for everyone, is a Palm Tungsten T3 PDA. This one has a pretty neat little audio recorder that is by no means audio quality but, if you don't overdrive the little iternal mic, will get all your ideas down (I even hold it up to the radio speaker to sample a song that my duo might consider doing). I also hum/sing ideas nto it; play guitar parts into it, etc. But the cool part is that you can of course list/name/categorize all your ideas, as well as put down lyrical ideas too into the memo part of the unit. Again, sound quality isn't a factor here; this is just a nice, small, efficient notepad for both audio and lyrical ideas. And it doesn't hurt that it also holds all kinds of contact and calendar info...

My .02 worth!