If it's been a while since you've listened to yourself play, whether it's a gig, rehearsal or just in the practice room, do yourself a favor and get a Zoom H2 Recorder. It won't cost you an arm and a leg, and for something so light that can literally fit in your pocket, this little dude captures sound quality rivaling that of a remote studio setup.

It's surprising how many uses you'll find for it once you hear the quality of the WAV and MP3 files it captures (up to 24-bit). In addition to my own projects, I use mine to record my daughter's flute solos, document family history from the "seasoned citizens" of the family, and replace many of the tasks for which I used to use my little Olympus VN-7200 Voice Recorder, which itself works great for lectures and meetings at my day job, but frankly is pretty lame when it comes to musical applications (although before buying my Zoom, I admit to taking it along to gigs anyway so I could at least get something for reference).

You couldn't ask for anything easier to operate; the H2 is truly a one-button start up, although it has more advanced features that allow you to tweak recording settings, transfer to a computer, choose from multiple mic modes (it has four microphones!), surround-sound recording, and much more. Depending upon the recording quality specified and size of the SD Flash card used, you can get up to 24 hours recording time. It can even be used as a USB mic to record directly to audio software, which would be would be perfect for podcasts, and yes, the mics are that good that you would actually want to use them.

One caution though, it has no external speaker for playback, so you either need to have a set of ear buds or hook it up via a 1/8 connection to studio monitors or a home stereo. If you really can't live without an external speaker or want more advanced features like on-board effects, XLR mic inputs, 4-track simultaneous recording and playback, overdubbing, and so on, you may want to consider it's big brother, the Zoom H4n. It's almost twice the price of the H2, but is so feature-packed that I really wouldn't do it justice here. The H4n is actually the first of these two units I used, having borrowed one from a friend for my daughter's flute recital, and I couldn't have been happier with the results. I didn't think I'd use all the advanced features, so I opted for the less-expensive but equally amazing-sounding H2. It's easily my favorite piece of new technology in several years.