Phone attachments for making videos. Get better sound

[Dagger Gordon]

Has anyone got good suggestions for useful attachments for your mobile phone for getting a better sound if you're making videos?

I've had to make some instructional videos lately, and we're clearly going to be doing this kind of thing for the foreseeable future, so might as well get them pretty good.

I think my phone videos are adequate much of the time, but I'm sure the sound quality could be better.

[John Kelly]

Hi David. I have a Boya mic, BY-MM1, which I use with my Tascam DR-05. I got it after seeing it over on the SAW group used by Simon, one of the regular posters. He used his to get distance from his phone when setting it up outdoors, and the sound seems reasonable. I have not tried it with a phone, but it comes with a neat wee holder, a carry bag and two different 3.5mm jacks, one for plugging into the Tascam or other recorders and the other for using with your phone. I like mine with the Tascam as I can have it on a longer lead, so place it as I wish while having the recorder beside me. I reckon that it is probably no better than the Tascam's own two mics, but should be an improvement on the built-in mic on a phone. Costs around £20. Several of my recent postings on the SAW Group were recorded using this mic via the Tascam before rendering down to mp3 - I record in wav format on the Tascam.
Hope this helps.

[Chuck Leyda]

Are you on Iphone or android?

I think Garageband is a great app and free. We're doing music videos for our church's online service. We're keeping it low tech just a phone or USB mic. Last time I ran it through Logic (could do the same thing in garageband) and added just a bit of reverb, compression, rolled off the lows and gave a slight high EQ boost. Nothing fancy. Took 5 minutes but it really made a difference in sound quality.

[Dagger Gordon]

Android.

[Peter Barnett]

AT2020 works on my phone.

[Chuck Leyda]

Irig makes a range of mic upgrades that work with Android phones. I haven't used them myself but they seem worth looking into.https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/1...1&ref_=ast_bln

The other idea might be to change the room you're recording in. A better sounding room could be a tech free sound upgrade.

[Dagger Gordon]

"The other idea might be to change the room you're recording in. A better sounding room could be a tech free sound upgrade"

I certainly think that experimentation with rooms is worth doing. Actually I find that doing it outside can quite effective.

[Simon DS]

Yes, as John was saying, I use a Boya microphone attached to a five meter cable, and the sound quality is pretty good while using my iPhone X. A couple of issues though. The first one is that if you allow the charger cable to touch the extension cable especially if the cable is coiled up then there is a low hum in the resulting recording.
Another issue is that recording gain is quite low, probably because of resistance in the cable.
A third issue, and remember the microphone is really quite good for just about £20, is that if the microphone is quite close to the instrument then it can amplify quite a lot of pick noise.
A friend of mine suggested that I use the microphone with a video camera app on the telephone, because he said, the iPhone camera app does similar things to audio as it does to image. As in ‘intelligent´ distortion.
Recently I have been sending my videos to BandLab which is great for sharing, but the increased quality tends to amplify background noises from my recording ´studio’, that is my kitchen. This is especially bad when it's raining because the traffic in the street makes a lot more noise on the wet road!!
In the next couple of days it's going to be quite warm for winter so I'll probably do some recording outside in the forest. In the summer, recording in the forest is not possible because birdsong volume levels are too high...