Portable recorders

Teetonetal

Are these actually any good? Any particular models to be recommended or avoided?

Joined a new band, so thinking of picking one up to record the rehearsals as they have no material recorded so far... would help me with writing 2nd guitar parts I think..

ThorpyFX

The zoom range is fantastic. A zoom h5n will allow you to capture four channels of sound in one hit. https://www.zoom-na.com/products/field-video-recording/field-recording/zoom-h5-handy-recorder

Teetonetal

That does look awesome, especially as it can be DSLR mounted...

was thinking more on the budget side though,  although that does seem quite good value.. 

really just want to use the onboard mics.

RocknRollDave

I have a Zoom H2, which I have used to record several of our gigs for reference purposes (e.g. to help deps to learn our song arrangements) and it works well for that. You will need to experiment with mic settings to get the perfect balance between the recording being loud enough and not overloading it into distortion, and if you are rehearsing in a small room you probably want to keep your band's volume down as low as you can so you get a clearer recording, but as @ThorpyFX says, Zoom do some great stuff.

ThorpyFX

Teetonetal said:

That does look awesome, especially as it can be DSLR mounted...

was thinking more on the budget side though,  although that does seem quite good value.. 

really just want to use the onboard mics.

the onboard miss are really great. and you can buy replaceable modules for different type of mids. I guess it isn't a budget item, but the key thing is that the sound quality is incredibly accurate and true to real life.

longi

I had a Zoom H1 and really wasn't very good as it only had an automatic recording level which wasn't suitable for recordig a live band. I replaced that with a Tascam DR-07 mk2 which is brilliant for that if thats all you want one for. The quality is really quite good and distortion free once it's set up. The bottom line is stay away from anything with an automatic recording level unless you want lots of clipping.

Ben8010

We use zoom h5 to record at our practises and it works great. In truth though for that application there are loads out there from Tascam, Boss etc. which will most likely do a good job.

Or you could go old school and buy a portable cassette recorder. And then you can release all your stuff on cassettes and all the cool hipster crowd will like you