Where Did My Great Guitar Riff Go?

It's the enduring creative mystery: You're noodling along on your instrument, stumble on an amazing lick or chord progression, and then something interrupts (phone, doorbell, power outage) and you forget your burst of genius. Where do all the lost riffs and solos go?

One of the cleverest new products I saw at AES last month meets that challenge head-on. The Line 6 BackTrack is a palm-size recorder that's always listening. The basic line-in model costs $99, and a model with a mic (see photo) costs $149.

A prototype BackTrack+Mic, spotted at AES. The big black button facing us sends captured riffs to a special folder.

Like a voice recorder with level-activated recording, the BackTrack sits there attentively and then drops into record only when you're playing, saving each thought as a separate file. Hear something you like? Press the Mark button and it will be stored to a special folder in the flash memory. You can force the BackTrack to record continuously by pressing Mark and Play simultaneously.

The memory holds up to 3 hours of 16-bit, 44.1kHz mono WAV audio (double that on the mic version). Higher and lower resolutions are supported too. It's powered by an internal battery, which lasts up to 8 hours and charges over USB. The USB connection is also how you transfer recordings to a computer. For extended sessions, you can power the device over USB.

Line 6 intended the BackTrack to insert between your guitar and amp, so there's no headphone jack on the basic model. Nor is there any internal effects processing, such as distortion and reverb; the idea is to capture the pure sound and then add effects later. (Line 6 makes other hardware and plug-ins for that.)

As a keyboardist, I would have preferred stereo recording, but simplicity was the design brief here. There's one input, one output, and four buttons: Play, Fast Forward, Rewind, and Mark. Just enough to capture those mysterious fleeting moments of creativity, but not enough to get in the way.