Amp demos recorded with cell phones are worse than useless

  • Thread starter Thread starter TheGreatGreen
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lol... All my vids are cell phone. Never had an issue as long as you understand what you are working with and how to make it work. You can't blast the amp or it will clip the phone. One of these days, I'll get a setup that sounds better, but for what I do it works.
 
iPhone mic, amps cranked, a little delay and plenty of feedback. Sounded great in the room and the recording captures this pretty well IMO.

 
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.
 
Little B said:
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?
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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.
 
braintheory said:
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”
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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.

It seems there's two distinct arguments going on here. Good tone, and bad recordings of good tone. Two completely different things to me, but I think the same for others. Some of the phone clips posted are flat out terrible but people chime in with how great the tone is because they block out the shitness and focus on the playing and general things like the amount of gain and basic character.

It's somewhat akin to a crappy, washed-out photo of say a very colourful view. You can convince yourself it's vivid and full of colour from assumption and extrapolation, but that doesn't mean it's a good picture. Give me the accurate shot on a nice camera any day.
 
jp1seattle said:
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.
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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.
 
Metalhex said:
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.
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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.
 
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ZEN Amps said:
It seems there's two distinct arguments going on here. Good tone, and bad recordings of good tone.
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I think this gets at the heart of the issue. Bad cell phone recordings (10 feet away, mic pointed at the floor, etc) don't care whether a tone is good or bad. If you record a rig with a cell phone like that, it doesn't matter what the rig is, it will make everything sound pretty much the same (that is... muddy and distant), provided similar gain/distortion levels.
 
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I think the ultimate solution to this problem is to change our perception of what good tone & a good recording is. From now on all videos and music albums should be recorded by a 16 year old kid with an iPhone 7!
 
TheGreatGreen said:
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.
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It could just be the rooms natural reverb too; I don't know.

I understand your points, though I think the same could be said about ? an amp....they can all sound the same (any Ola video or any other YouTube sensation)

Personally I don't know anyone who uses cell phone recordings to showcase the characteristics of amps, but perhaps there are people who do that. But I think a cell phone recording of any kind can easily identify a scooped Dime tone verses any other tone, for example.
 
I don’t know about that. I find some cell phone clips closer to in room tone. Miked tone is completely different. Of course for cell phone it can’t be very loud though or it distorts.
 
Beautiful day for a troll headline, it worked perfectly and got all of us to join in.

Thanks for trolling, it's what the world needs now.

IMO, YMMV
 
Pretty sure all of the monmyth videos i watched were cell footage in the room and that was enough to convince me to buy one.
I certainly wasn’t disappointed!!
Thanks shea
 
TheGreatGreen said:
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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.
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This was a great post. You are right, most amps and pedals sound very similar when through a phone. You need that mic up near the grill and a preamp if you want to have an idea. An "idea", because mic placement is huge as well as are speakers. Some people don't know how to get usable tones out of a mic.
 
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