In this lesson, you’re going to learn how
to make studio-quality bass tracks using your
iPhone.
Hi, I’m Luke from becomeabassist.com and
if you want to learn how to make professional-sounding
bass tracks for less than 60 bucks, then hang
around and check this out.
[Video Intro]
I’ve said it before, but I love living in
the time we do.
If you don’t want to hire a massive studio
with a big budget, you don’t have to!
You can still make great sounding recordings
of your own bass using nothing but your iPhone.
Of course you can’t just plug your bass
straight into your phone, so you’ll need
something like this.
This is an iRig 2 - it’s like a mini audio
interface that lets you send signal to your
phone.
There are other ones around that are just
as good as this one, but I picked this up
for $59 Australian, so I’m guessing these
things are even cheaper in American dollars.
If you’re using an iPhone running iOS, then
this is literally the only extra thing you
need to buy to start making great recordings
of your bass.
That being said, let’s jump in and record
something!
This whole process couldn’t be simpler.
All we need to do is plug your bass and your
headphones into the iRig, and your iRig into
your phone.
Actually - I lied.
This process COULD be simpler if these phones
still had a headphone jack.
R.I.P. the headphone jack.
So you’ve actually got to plug your iRig
into the little dongle and then the dongle
into your phone.
The iRig also has a gain knob so I’m going
to set that roughly 50% and see how that goes
- we can put it up or down later if we’re
getting too much signal or not enough.
As far as hardware goes, that’s all you
have to do for now.
The best part about using an iphone is that
there’s already software in your phone that’s
perfect for doing what we want.
Garageband comes standard in all iPhones - at
least that’s true at the time I’m filming
this video - I have no idea if that’ll change
in the future though.
So what we’ll do is open up the Garageband
app and the first thing you’ll want to do
is click on this little plus sign here to
create a new song.
That’ll give you all these options here.
You have keyboards, drums - all this stuff.
You have a couple of options here - you can
either choose audio recorder here - this will
just give you a direct, dry signal of your
bass with no real processing or you can pick
amp over here and click on the bass option
and let’s do that.
That’ll give us a few different options
to choose from in processing the dry signal.
In this version of Garageband we’ve got
a modern amp, classic, flip top and just a
direct box type of signal, but you’ll notice
if I play something on my bass, [plays bass]
we’re not actually getting any signal coming
back to us yet.
That means if we record something, you won’t
be able to hear yourself as you’re playing
and we don’t want that.
We want to hear ourselves, right?
It’s an easy fix though.
Just tap on this little guitar cable looking
thing near the top left and that’ll take
us to this screen.
This is super important.
The one we want to change first is this one
down here - monitor.
Tap that one to ‘on’ and now we should
be able to hear ourselves.
[plays bass] Awesome - let there be sound!
Now this one down the bottom here - the noise
gate - that’s useful for if
your bass is kind of noisy.
You can play around to make sure that when
you’re not playing anything, you actually
get silence and not background hiss or buzz
from your bass.
The top one up here is your input level - basically
how much level are you going to feed to the
track.
You don’t want it to be too high otherwise
you’ll get nasty digital distortion like
this [plays bass] Gross - you don’t want
that.
Too low and your bass will be too quiet.
You can also mess with the gain on the iRig
or whatever interface you’re using as well.
You want a nice thick sound but not so thick
that it distorts.
I guess you want more of a slim thick sound.
So let’s play around and see what we 
can do.
[plays around] Ok cool - I’m pretty happy
with that.
If you click done, you can actually start
recording right now.
Just click the red record button and you’re
off to the races essentially.
Check it out.
[plays bass] Really good-sounding bass directly
to your iPhone.
Now this is cool and everything, but it gets
really fun when you actually have something
to play with, so let me go back to a track
that I’ve already made - just with drums
and bunch of guitar loops.
It sounds like this.
[plays track] And if we want to record something,
again just hit that red button and away we
go.
[plays track]
So that’s it!
Very simple once you know how.
Now if you’re just starting out and not
sure what to record, you can start with some
simple beginner bass lines and if you want,
I have a set of 5 of them available on becomeabassist.com.
You can download the tabs and notation
and there’s also a video showing you exactly
how to play them.
Just click the link in the description or
this card up here.
Feel free to watch the video, or go straight
to filling out the form on that page and you’ll
be sent the tabs for the songs completely
free.
To recap though, you learned how to record
professional-sounding bass tracks using your
iPhone.
You learned that you needed some kind of interface
to plug your bass into like the iRig 2 that
I was using, but once you’re in, you just
have to make sure you can hear yourself by
turning on monitoring, and making sure your
gain was set to roughly the right place and
then you’re pretty much off to the races.
Thanks so much for watching - I really appreciate
having you with me.
I’m Luke from becomeabassist.com and hopefully
I’ll catch you in another video soon.
