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Apart from your notebook, a voice recorder is your most valuable fieldwork tool, so choose one with care. Digital voice recorders come in all price ranges from around $30 to well over $1,000. The fact that modern recorders are small and can record long sessions without checking on them is a great blessing. You do, however, need to pay attention to a number of features when considering which recorder to buy – and you should buy your own. Other equipment you can borrow if necessary, but you need to own a voice recorder.

Of critical importance in choosing a recorder is its range and clarity of recording. Recorders come with built-in microphones of varying quality. Very expensive models can record music in stereo with extraordinary precision. This is overkill for regular fieldwork. For a typical interview you need a recorder that you can place on a table between you and your interviewee, and it will pick up all that both of you say – clearly. Do not buy a recorder online. Go to a store and test out their products. Sit in a simulated interview situation with the salesperson and test out the floor models. Make sure that when you play back the recording, you can hear the voices plainly, and they are not unduly muddied by ambient noise in the environment.

You will find that a number of recorders pick up voices adequately, so then you must turn your attention to other features. You need a recorder that will allow you to keep interviews separate in labeled files, and you must be able to pinpoint precise moments in each interview via a counter or timer. It is important to have all of your field data properly filed and indexed, so that when you are writing notes or a paper, you can jump immediately to that spot in an interview where, say, Arjun talked about fracturing his pelvis in a skiing accident. It’s not good enough to know that he talked about it at some point in an interview last Thursday. Good indexing is vital, which means that your recorder must facilitate this process without complications. More details on indexing and filing are laid out in the relevant projects.

Some recorders use replaceable batteries, some rechargeable. If it has a rechargeable battery, buy a spare, and keep it charged. If it uses replaceable batteries, keep spares with you at all times. Batteries have a bad habit of dying at inconvenient moments. Also make sure that data on the recorder is easily transferable to other media. Ideally it should have a memory card that allows you to make backup copies of interviews on your laptop or other device. Backup copies are essential. Never rely on a single copy. You may also consider backing up your data on a cloud storage service.