iRig

shaundtsl

Ok, so I got my iRig yesterday, my first impression was, R800 for this little plastic thing. But I also wasn’t expecting much more and I suppose it is of an alright quality and will do the job.

I quite like the idea of portable recording (that’s another reason why I got the BR600), I am planning on using these devices to (iPhone, iPad2 and Boss BR600) to record instruments separately and bring it all into reaper eventually for mixing down etc.

I downloaded garageband for iPhone (was 500mb) and was immediately impressed by what you can do with this app. One thing I didn’t like was to undo something, you have to shake the iPhone and you get the option to undo, this becomes quite irritating as you have the iRig, earphones connected etc.

Another thing which can get a bit irritating is the app often goes into an “optimising track” state where it seems to organise everything, then again, I am doing multitrack recording to a cellphone so I can’t really complain. Apparently the iPad2 will handle this much better and I am sure the iPhone4s too.

The drums a pretty cool, you play them in real-time with a metronome, you can also copy and paste the pieces around etc. The metronome showed me how shocking my timing is…

So I put a simple drum track together to test this whole thing out. Then loaded up the guitar amp which seems to be a fender amp. I then
added in a vintage drive pedal. There is plenty more available (pedals and amps), but I will get to those at a later stage.

I tweaked a bit (as if I know what I was doing) until I got something which sounded alright to my ears and hit record. I recorded two rhythm guitar tracks and panned one left and one right (that is like my ultimate recording technique).

Then, for the lead bit, I used the same fender amp and vintage drive pedal but tried to boost the treble and volume a little bit more, again as if I knew what I was doing.

Then for the bass, I used the amp which seems to look like a vox with no effects or pedals. I have an old beaten bass and I had to push the volume just to hear the thing.

All in all I am quite happy and I think I will have many hours of fun with this thing, it has its limitations, but as I mentioned, it’s a cellphone.

Garageband also has cool “Smart instruments” which is nice to mess around with, great drums and what so far seems to be quite nice amp sims etc.

Exporting the tracks was alright, you can export through iTunes as a .m4a file. I used a converter to convert to wav file to import into reaper. The only reason I brought it into reaper was because there was about 20secs of nothing before the music started, I dont know why, but I will find a way around that. From reaper I exported to mp3. You can also export the tracks separately through iTunes as a .band file apparently and if need be, use audacity to convert the files to wav or something to bring it into another DAW.

As far as I am concerned, if you have an iPhone/iPad, it is definitely worth checking out.

Costs:
Garageband: $5 (around R35 I think) at the appstore
iRig: R800 through wantitall.co.za (took about 3 weeks for delivery)

That is my amateur review as I am still very novice to recording as a whole and I have plenty to learn about this setup, but its great fun and thats why we do these thing isn’t it?

I have uploaded the short demo piece I recorded last night, please let me know what you guys think.

http://www.dtsl.co.za/media/iRig/me.mp3

Thanks!

doc-phil

That sounds really good! I'm quite surprised that it's possible to achieve this sort of thing on an ipad and iphone. If I had any apple gadgets I would definitely look in to this for on-the-go recording.

shaundtsl

Thanks doc-Phil, I think with more time and practice one can do quite a lot more. I think if you already have an apple device and play guitar this is really worth it. I hear there are some cheaper alternatives to the irig going.