How to Make Better-sounding iPhone Videos
Let’s face it — everyone’s making videos with their iPhones these days and posting them to social media. The video quality is certainly adequate, so long as they get the lighting in the ballpark. But have you noticed how they sound? Oh, yeah. There’s a defining sound that comes from an iPhone mic — or mics. iPhones may have as many as four microphones built into the body. And you know how many of those microphones were designed for recording high-quality music? None.
So, the question I wanted to explore was “What does it take to get better-quality audio into your iPhone?” And I’m not talking about multiple mics, mixers, or interfaces. I just wanted to find out what the easy options are that an artist or musician can attach or adapt to their iPhone and how much difference they can make in the sonic quality.
For this test, I didn’t put any microphones right in the singer’s face. I wanted to keep the mics off camera and as inconspicuous as possible. All the mics you’ll hear were plugged into the iPhones either directly or by means of an Apple adapter with no external hardware, except the Rode NTG-2 shotgun, which I ran into an Apogee Solo interface. All the video recordings were made using the Shure Motiv Video app, which allows control of various audio parameters.
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