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iProng: Interview with The 88
Our friends at iProng Magazine have an interview with The 88, who recorded their latest single directly on iPhone:
The 88 is a band from Los Angeles. Their upbeat brand of music has been featured on The O.C., Grey’s Anatomy, How I Met Your Mother. Recently, they have made headlines by being the first band to record a single, the song “Love is the Thing,” directly onto an iPhone.
How hard was it to using an iPhone as opposed to a more traditional way of recording?
It was super easy. Everything on a Mac and on an iPhone is very user-friendly. It was just like you’d imagine. Everything is very self-explanatory; you don’t need any manuals or to be a recording engineer genius to figure it out. Anybody can do it. And we kept that theme of “anybody can do this” and did it very simply with cheap instruments – the drummer used a toy drum set, the bass player ran his bass through a practice guitar amp. I played keyboards on a cheap $150 keyboard. We didn’t use any microphones at first and just used the built-in microphone to record everything. I did a mix of that and it sounded cool but the lead vocals sounded a little bit distant. It still had a very unique sound and I thought it was pretty cool, but we also thought it might make it even more intimate to try to use a microphone going directly into the phone to do the lead vocal. So we did a little more research and I found a thing Alesis called Pro Track. And with that you hook your phone into it and you can hook a microphone into that. So we re-recorded the lead vocal into that to get a more close up feel. And I think it came out really great. But all the other tracks were recorded using the built-in mic, which actually is a decent mic. It picks up everything really nicely. It’s a lot better than I expected.