I've recorded all of my YouTube amp clips ( not demos) with an iRig Pre HD. SM57 into the iRig and that goes straight into my iPhone. Really couldn't be any easier. No editing, eq, hi/low pass filter thingamajinging.What's out there mic wise for the android/ I phone that can be plugged into them to increase sound quality ,if you don't want to get into it deep with a daw but just staying in the cell phone realm? Any add on? Plug ins?
This is my opinion exactly. We ignore how bad the recording is and make assumptions based on what we do actually have. The playing also gets conflated with what the amp is offering - as demonstrated by the terrible sounding clips of good players that frequently receive praise.Gearheads like us can hear an iPhone clip of a Gjika and be able to tell its great, but when I show clips like that to my friend who’s not a guitarist (but a really good musician/composer) he’ll always be like “that sounds horrible, this not acceptable, how can you even hear anything from this. This sounds worse than a line 6”
Lol….I can’t believe that I thought this sounded good at one time. Of course I think I was coming from a Zoom 505.Amps? Mics? Heh, step up to the big leagues, kid!View attachment 108713
Believe it or not there are some good tones to be coaxed out of it still, but you gotta use IR's. They were getting there with the amp sims by that point but had a long long way to go with speaker sims. They are truly shockingly bad. And the effects, especially the chorus/flange sounds are beyond laughable.Lol….I can’t believe that I thought this sounded good at one time. Of course I think I was coming from a Zoom 505.
You can have all the best equipment in the world and still sound like muddy toilet shit. Just check out any Malmsteen record since the year 2000.
Yet, check out this "shitty" cell phone recording where he sounds phenomenal...
Will that recording give you an insight to the characteristics of an amp? Maybe not. But the point is is it doesn't sound like shit.
It seems there's two distinct arguments going on here. Good tone, and bad recordings of good tone.
Good to see you as well.Good to see you showing your face Bob
It could just be the rooms natural reverb too; I don't know.But... that is a shitty clip if the goal of the clip was to show off what the amp sounds like. That was clearly not the goal of that video though.
He does sound like he's playing quite well and articulately there... through a rig that we're listening to from the other end of a cave. It literally sounds like a 100% wet reverb mix. It could be a Marshall stack, it could be a Mesa Mark, it could be a Roland Blues Cube, it could be an open back 1x12 pedal platform combo amp with a distortion pedal running into it. The shitty phone mic, plus the distance it is from the rig and the direction it's facing nullifies any details of the tone itself. He could be playing through effectively any sufficiently high gain rig in the world, it doesn't matter because that phone makes them all sound the same: woofy, fizzy, mushy, harsh, distant.
This thread is not just about how bad cell phone mics are, it's also about the atrocious recording techniques you necessarily have to employ to record with them. Pretty much any mic you would use to record a guitar amp would sound like a washy mess if you placed it 10-15 feet away from the speaker and pointed its mic at the floor, like how basically every cell phone audio clip is recorded. It's not even a rough approximation of how a person might listen to an amp in the room. It's just poor recording. The fact that the mic itself is so primitive only adds to the bad recording quality.
This is a picture of the iPhone 7's mic. Samsung cell phone mics are basically identical. To buy a replacement costs about $0.25. Notice the dimensions. The diaphragm is less than 2 millimeters wide.
When you record a demo of your multi-thousand dollar rig with one of these, with the cell phone mic facing down at the floor like is usually done because as we all know it's more important to record the "star" rocking out during the "amp demo" than it is to actually record the sound of the amp as featured in the proclaimed "amp demo," you're wasting everyone's time. Also, I'm sorry but no, it doesn't "sound like it does in the room and I'm doing you a favor and giving you the real life experience, bruh." It sounds like you're recording an amp with the worst $0.25 radioshack mic imaginable, that is actually pointing away from the amp on top of that. Listening to an amp recorded like this sounds like you're listening to an amp that was recorded in some normal way but is now being played back through a cheap AM radio that has been placed in a tile bathroom, and you're 10 feet outside that bathroom.
Cell phone amp demos are not only useless, they actually detract from how any given setup sounds. They sound absolutely nothing like either what the rig sounds like mic'd, or what it sounds like "in the room." Cell phone mics as they're typically used to record amps (again, filming the "star" while the mic is pointed at the floor) make every amp sound identically like a boomy, woofy, fizzy mess.
If you do this, I'm talking specifically to you. Please stop. You are not only wasting your own time, but everyone else's. The clips you're posting are absolutely useless and sound nothing like the amp in any capacity, in any context. If you have the money to buy a guitar rig worth posting online about, you have the money to buy a used SM57 for like $50-60, which will make all the difference in the world.
Thank you. That is all.