Recording Band Practice w/ iOS device. Possible multi-channel?

[Taustin Powers]

I play in a 7 piece funk band with drums, guitar, bass, keys, brass and vocals. I want to do some semi-decent recording of our practice.

So far, I use the voice recorder app on my iPhone 11 Pro. Just put it in a corner and let it record. It works surprisingly well! Are there other apps I should look at for this? Something that allows some minor EQ'ing or compression maybe?

Also, is there a small hardware mixer/interface that I can hook up to my iPad via Lightning to do simultaneous multi-channel recording in Garage Band or something? Maybe four or five inputs, so I can place a handful of mics all over the room and mix the tracks later? That way I'd have one track with focus on drums, one with bass/guitar, and so on.

My cheap work-around would be to place several iPhones and iPads all over the room, use the voice recorder, and import all the tracks to Garage Band later.

 

[Leonard.Green]

Hi,

For starters - your setup (just the phone) is pretty good for recording your band practice in a controlled environment, because your iPhone has stereo mics. Position yourself physically in the room as you would like to have the instruments placed in the mix and voila.
As for software you might want to try iOS version of GarageBand. It has both EQ and compression available in plugins.

I have an older iPhone that records mono, so I use an external Zoom U-44 interface connected via Lightning-USB adapter. Interface is equipped with Zoom XYH-5 stereo mics as an expansion.
That way I have 4 separate tracks total in garage band (or rather 2 stereo tracks in my case, but I could get 4 separate instruments in mono if need be). Usually it is - XYH-5 stereo mics for drums, and both XLR/Jack combined inputs connected to main out of reharsal room mixer.
The only annoying thing is that for long recordings in garageband I have to make a project with super low bpm.

If you want 7 separate tracks for your band (or 8 with drums in stereo) you might have to look for an octa input interface. Have not tried that, but if it works with core audio on mac, I might work with Garageband aswell.

Oh, and one more thing - tried that several phones placed in different spots scenario, and it never worked for me.
Tracks have to be manually aligned in DAW, and usually they don't match in lenght of the recording. Not lenght in an obvious way (people not hitting record at the same time), but rather no single word clock resulting in the same sound lasting 1s in one track and 1.01s in another. But those were phones from several manufacturers, not only apple, so that may have been also the cause. You can fix that using flex in Logic (one of the reasons I upgraded years ago), but afaik Garageband doesn't have that function.