Amazing advice/discussion in here. I wanted to my 2 cents on a couple of topics, firstly the issue of releasing everything that you record, or was stated "
The problem with recording an album by using material from looping jam sessions is that it might
be spontaneous fresh sounding music, but it lacks from (complex) composed tracks and good sounding.
We will be overwhelmed with so many music in our times, cause everyone thinks: Oh, I just
sit down, take my guitar and looping device, turn on the laptop and record some tunes and
release it on CD, put it on the internet for download or just on myspace - player.
It´s so easy to release music. I´m not sure if I like it."
The same argument could be made against recording/releasing live shows, or jazz albums which consist of single jam sessions. Heck Acid Mother's Temple is famous for 65 min single track albums, which consist of everything they jammed on. The idea is that through honestly expressing the process of musical creation you make a huge statement, that not every second of everything has to be the perfect second, and if everything sounded good all the time, then nothing would sound AMAZING(as there would be no point of reference for better than good).
That said, of course it's possible to hapzardly put together a recording of yourself, call it an album, and release it online expecting massive response. It's certainly easy enough, but people don't have to listen. In fact, if it's not any good, they probably won't . I ,therefore, don't see why the idea of capturing good ideas when they happen spontaneously is a bad thing. I just think you have to understand your own playing, and learn how to edit yourself.
Okay, so onto how to record your ideas spontaneously. This was of huge concern to me, cause I play gigs regularly, and create jams on the spot, and I wanted to be able to cohesively transition between jams/songs. I use Ableton Live, and 5 looper plugins in sync. In that setup I have to stop my session(and subsequently the recording) in order to set new tempos using a looper plugin. That means my recording would stop everytime I set a new tempo, making for a very NOT LIVE(lol) feel to my recordings. My solution has been to run ReaRoute as my ASIO driver, and routing all audio in and out of Live into Reaper. This allows me to MultiTrack record( I use 1 Stereo channel, and 2 mono) in 4 tracks without ever stopping my recording, while I run amuck in my Ableton Live session. This gives me a great live feel, with a stereo track for all my Loop outputs, 1 mono channel for my instrumental inputs(whether they be from a VSTi, or live guitar), and 1 channel for my Vocals. This makes it really easy to mix, for studio work I can also make each loop have an individual input in Reaper, giving me full control over the mix for editing/mixing. Hope that was less confusing that it seemed to be as I was writing it.