Saving new songs...

Ok, I've been playing for about 5 or 6 years now.. and finally I'm coming up with a bunch of new material myself. Mostly acoustic. Anyway, sometimes I'll sit here for an hour and come up with maybe 10 different riffs or parts to potential songs. Now.. how do you guys remember all of this?!!? I don't have any fancy recording equipment, I wish I had just a basic 4-track and even record a whole session, I don't care, but I seem to forget most of the stuff I come up with the next day :(

So, how do you guys recomend going about this? Do you have digital recorders, 4-tracks.. etc? Or do you write the music down? I never think to write it down, I mean I'm playing and stuff just comes to me and I go with it.. no time to write it out. :(

I have owned a 4 track when I turned 15. I hava recorded 2 albums worth of material with it. Now I record on my PC, and I have learnt to write music down...

Anyways, buy even a ****ty recorder, but keep your ideas somewhere...

I´ve discovered that a good way to remember all the ideas you have is to immediately put them into your computer as a midi-file. You don´t need much equippment for that - just powertab or Guitarpro or Cubase or whatever.

I always programm the stuffi develop on the guitar in - even if it is only a few notes - and save it in a "ideas" folder. and whith time you will have a large library of licks, riffs, melodies, etc where you can choose from when looking for song-material. The advantageof that is, that you just need to click on PLAY and you´ll immediately recall how you played it.

-=[Azrael]=-

I supppose I should just start saving it on computer, I mean I have the equipment (plenty of HD space, microphone, recording software, etc...) because you're right, the second I hear my riff again, I know how to play it, its just after coming up with so much new stuff you forget what you came up with the other day. I suppose I'll start doing that for now.

I bought a yamaha 4 track when I was 19-20. That helped me a lot. Before that I used a simple cassette player with an intergraded mic. Just your basic cassette player that costs about 15$ US.

Now I use my computer to record licks and basic Idea and then work with them on my four track.

There are some virutal four track for the computer too.

DD clip was one but that's a couple years back so I don't know if they are still around.

If you can afford a burner to burn your stuff to cd
that would be the best way to go or something like,
cooledit pro which has 64 tracks then you could convert your wav files to mp3s.(Wav files will eat your hard-drive
up.
Now windows xp has a movie maker which you could use,
to make video clips and burn them on a cd.
I use cooledit pro fruityloops plus guitar pro3 for tabs.
Also have acid pro.
I would recemmend gettin a program to convert your wav
files to mp3 some encoders)are free.

Mark

Yeah, I have all the software, various recording software, I do a lot of encoding of MP3s anyway.. so that wouldn't be a problem. Just never really thought of turning it on and just recording what I play, haha.. oh well, I will do that now before I let anymore gems I create slip away :(