Dime : hey sorry for the late reply, been real busy finishing up recording my last 3 bands for this year.
to answer your Zoom H4 question , read this thread :
http://soft.com.sg/forum/showthread.php?t=31038
in fact if you "stalk" my previous posts, you'll see the few questions I've answered. you'll probably be able to learn abit from there
http://soft.com.sg/forum/search.php?do=finduser&u=4335
sef : well , if you're asking me if there's any local album that impresses me, I've never really thought of it that way. cos whatever answers that comes to my head will be biased. like for example, B Quartet's Smitten Bard CD is recorded by a good friend of mine, I'll be like "I liked that cd, i bought it from agingyouth, but i'm not like a big fan of the band, i was buying the cd more to show support for my friend's recording, and with respect to the band instead of just asking for mp3 pirated rips from my friend straight right?" so you're not asking for a fair opinion here, you're asking for my biased one haha. but yeah, B Quartet are amazingly humble guys in real life. they got my respect.
love me butch's guitar is cool, if you ask me, the way it sounded in the recording sounds just like how they do on live stages (I filmed love me butch at Rouge club and baybeats.) makes it all sound "Real" y'know haha.
as for my view on how "local bands albums can't reach that standard" , actually if you think about it, the local scene support has boomed, last time it was really rare to have any local band to be featured on TV / radio / newspapers. and I , as a normal consumer (not very involved in the scene) , live my everyday life reading papers and flipping radio/tv channels, can hear "LOCAL BANDS" without even TRYING TO! last time there were only a few recording studios, probably less than 10 or 15. today there's 30+ and still increasing. and almost every kid knows how to record/mix. even got to know a 14 year old who's into recording/mixing recently. I was still fiddling around in windows's sndrec32.exe when I was 14 man. (i'm 24.) I don't think local scene "cannot make it" , never did. it's going on a smooth upward hill. not a steep mount everest, but a small bukit timah hill kind of slope progression. we just gotta keep doing what we do best. bands keep writing good songs. studios keep the competition up to improve the sound. more jamming studios around singapore so we bands don't have to travel from one end to the other side of singapore just to have some decent practise (wth man, damn them public transport cost increase). slowly there'll be people/companies with more "Financial power" to support local bands/musicians. and i'm sure it'll all work out in the long run.
90cents worth