Dear Seasoned Musicians --

Please help.

We are seeking a good simple way to record practice sessions.

Here is the use case.

We have small Jazz combo (guitar, drums, piano, bass) and we practice in a basement or living-room.

We want to record our live practice sessions, for study, for review, for rough-cut demos, etc.

We do not need to do any post-recording editing, except maybe just set the overall volume of the recording-- for now, we just need to capture what one would hear with one's ears if one were in the center of the room while we are practicing.

(Note that this is just for a draft, live-to-tape, quick-and-dirty, recording. We will eventually be doing another type of recording whereby we send each instrument to a mixer and then record each track digitally to a computer hard-drive, mix it properly, etc-- but that is a wholly different recording project and we are not doing that right now. Right now, we just want to a simple way to capture what is "in the air" when we are practicing.)

What is a good, simple, relatively inexpensive way to do this?

Specifically what equipment is needed?

What should be avoided?

What do you think?

Please advise.

Thanks.

-- Mark Kamoski