LeftyBassist.com

Hi,

Just wondering how those of you who record with video go about it to get the best sound. I'm wondering if an iPhone or macBook camera will lose the low end, which defeats the purpose of recording bass, or it its better to run it through my focus rite into garage band - or if you have any other suggestions for gear, gadgets or recording techniques?

What are your needs? Are you putting together a demo for your website or trying to secure more gigs? If you're just looking to do a simple shoot and record the sound for your own satisfaction, then I'd say that neither an iPhone nor camera will really capture the best sound as they are unless you use better mics for your sound input. A few companies make stereo mics for the iPhone. Zoom makes the IQ6 and IQ7, for example, which plug right into your phone and offer a nice variety of mic setups (XY, mid side, etc). I own an older model of one of these, and it does a very good job.

A band I'm working with just finished a live video shoot/recording for those purposes. We recorded live to digital 24 track, which allows for the best instrument isolation and control. So numerous DIs and mics were used to capture everything, including a set of stereo condensers hanging overhead just to capture room ambience. Of course, there's still mic bleed through overall from vocal mics and other mics that may be on stage picking up the room sound, but it's still way better than just recording with a single camera. We ended up using 6 cameras overall - 5 GoPros and 1 HD camera. These were either mounted on tripods or even on instrument headstocks, bodies, etc. None of the sound picked up from the camera will likely be used for the final mix, so video clips will be synced to the audio in Final Cut Pro.

This may be way overkill for what you need to do, however. One excellent low cost solution would be to pick up something like one of Behringer's X-Air series mixers. The X-Air 12 channel is only around $249 and has 12 inputs that send 12 independent channels right to your DAW (Garageband) via USB out. (My band just bought the XR-18 18 channel model, $499). You control the mixer with your iPad or iPhone.

As crazy as it sounds, we have taken the sound from the board then mixed it in with the video from the phone. The Samsung phone has amazing video, the sound is OK but using Sony Vegas I stripped the phones sound and inserted with sound from the board. We are lucky that we great a great mix out of the board. Another option would be sound from good quality MP3 recorded.

Again as stated above it depends on the end goal, for us it was some demo so people could get an idea of what we sound like live.

Nothing crazy about that, Bob. I've done many videos that way too. I think the vast majority of live mixers bands are using have limited outs, usually just a single RCA stereo out, so in the past I've had to do some blending of board and video audio to get good sound. You almost have to, since the board mix usually sounds too sterile and you need the audio from the camera to add some room ambience. What I like about these newer digital mixers is they do offer true independent multi track outs which can be assigned either pre or post fader, DI, multiple aux outs, etc. and they're incredibly cheap.