What do folks think of this beastie?

[AndyR]

Just heard about this from another forum... not convinced it's for me at all, but hey ho...

http://www2.gibson.com/Memory-Cable.aspx

When I dug deeper, I found it won't play back through the cable itself, you have to get the audio (WAV) off onto something that will play it... I kinda lost interest after that!

I quite like the marketing, and the "lost ideas" thing they're playing towards - it's quite well thought out. But this aspect doesn't appeal to me personally. I kinda thrive on those "lost ideas", always have done, it's what keeps me "alive" musically ... I never record when I'm dreaming up riffs or generally noodling. I tend to feel that if it was any good then I'll remember it or find it again some other day (and I really do not have time to go listening to reams of stuff I played just in case there was something good!)(I tried it on walkmans years ago - I ended up with a load of tapes I binned )

I'd be very interested to hear what other people think. I suspect some will think it just a gimmick (I almost think this myself, but not quite), and that some will think "hey, that's just what I always wanted!"

[Gnasty]

Yeah i can`t see this flying. A lot of business money put into this it looks but what`s wrong with me just sitting down playing guitar and pressing record on my br or computer? Hell even my iphone. I already have that technology.
I wouldn`t buy it but that`s just my opinion.

[cuthbert]

When I dug deeper, I found it won't play back through the cable itself, you have to get the audio (WAV) off onto something that will play it... I kinda lost interest after that!

If this cable could do something like that (play back directly through the cable into the amp), with a button that could take you back at an interval of say, 30 sec - I think I'd find it more interesting.

But as it's designed, it seems like a lot of work that could be done more easily with a recorder. I know the way I tend to do it is to be playing around, and an idea strikes and I grab a recorder of some kind and capture it. But I haven't gone back to many of those things...

[AndyR]

Yep, that's kind of where I stand.

Immediate playback through the amp would be interesting. I can imagine that helpful in "reviewing" a riff or something you've just played.

But I've never ended up using an idea that I captured on a recorder (unless I'm arranging a song on a basic recording - yeah, I try riffs etc on that, but I'm into the realm of "tracking" on a recording by then). I used to record ideas on a tape-recorder back in the 80s, but they were rarely inspiring enough to carry on with. And funnily enough, I'd always remembered the inspiring ones - so I hadn't needed to record them!!

What I really wanted back then was a decent-ish studio set-up to record the songs "properly"... and, er, funnily enough, that's what I've got now!!

[64Guitars]

Yeah, I feel the same as you guys. At first, the idea of being able to capture those moments of inspiration seems appealing. But this thing records up to 13 hours! I wouldn't want to have to sift through all that later in the hope of finding something worth keeping. Plus, I think knowing that I'm being recorded somehow hampers my creativity to some degree. I'm sure we've all experienced those moments where you're noodling around on the guitar and come up with something cool so you plug into your BR and press Record, only to find that you can't play it worth a damn while the red light's on.

It's great that they can make a recorder small enough to fit in a lump in a guitar cord. But I don't think that's the best place for it. It presumes that you'll always want to plug into a guitar amp. But most of the time when I'm noodling, I'm not plugged into anything. I just pick up the guitar and play. So I don't want a 10 or 20-foot guitar cord plugged into my guitar when the other end's not going to be plugged into anything.

A better implementation of this idea would have been to build it into a module like the VOX amPlug. There'd be plenty of room for the recorder, playback circuitry and controls, and a headphone jack. And when you want to use a guitar amp, you'd just plug an ordinary guitar cable into the module. Instead of recording 13 hours, it should just record your last 30 minutes, automatically overwriting the oldest material as it goes. Then when you have that moment of inspiration and play something great, you can stop the recorder when you're done and transfer the 30-minute recording to your computer.



If someone made something like that, I might be interested. But a cable with a recorder lump? No thanks.

[SharksDontSleep]

Wouldn't work for me ... 13 hours!! Ye gods.
A Boss BR is good enough to do all that the memory cable can do ... And more!!

Besides ... Why would I want to save my endless renditions of Pretty Vacant?

[64Guitars]

Found this video on SonicState. A few things I picked up from the video that I didn't see on the website:

• Price $99
• 16-foot cable
• Included 4GB microSD card can hold 13 hours of recording but the battery only last 8 hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13_4IiMaDXs

[cuthbert]

^How does a product like that get green-lighted? 

[AndyR]

• Price $99
• 16-foot cable
• Included 4GB microSD card can hold 13 hours of recording but the battery only last 8 hours.

I'd wondered what "price comparable to premium cables" meant!

And I had wondered about the 16ft in the original blurb I read. That's about the minimum I could have coped with in a band situation, in fact it would have been too short for some situations. And, of course, it would probably be viewed as too long by many people just using it in a home-studio.

To be fair, though - the "13 hours vs 8 hours" or similar could easily be said about many recording doofers, eg my old MBR...