4 Track Recording for the iPhone with Four Track

When I was in highschool, I saved all of my money to buy a Tascam 4 track portastudio so I could learn how to record my own songs. One of my friends had one and was creating some really cool music using it. Buying that 4 track machine was my first real adventure into jotting down musical ideas and working on individual arrangements with sound. Everything was recorded onto affordable cassette tape utilizing the 4 channels of the tape in one direction (hence 4 tracks). I learned so much about recording audio and it made me a better guitar player. It was money well spent.

Fast-forward to today: digital recording is everywhere. No longer are we confined to the analog limitations and 4 tracks has been replaced by 16 tracks minimum and unlimited tracks if you desire. Many recording studios take the form of a Mac or PC and a I/O box that converts the analog audio signal to digital. Most of the time, these setups require a lot of time and effort to set up… no where near as easy as my old 4 track analog recorder. Even the portable recorders aren’t really all that portable. Most are the sizes of a small box and still require AC power.
Enter the iPhone! I’ve always dreamed of having a portable 4 track recorder in my pocket to jot down musical ideas when the mood hit. Now that dream is a reality! Sonoma Wire Works has released Four Track , the 4 track recorder for the iPhone.

I wanted to see how intuitive this app would be to use so I didn’t read through any of the guides and went straight to using it. The results: I made great sounding music on my first try! Four Track is very easy to use! Simply select the track you want to record on and click the slider to start recording.

What I liked: Four Track allows you to jot down ideas just like a real digital 4 track machine. Audio quality was very good and I could control the mix of each track and even pan each track to the desired location I wanted to. Getting the music you’ve recorded off of the iPhone couldn’t be easier since it allows you to connect your computer directly to the iPhone via a wifi IP address that will automatically allow you to grab your music in .wav format for download or import into some other multi-track environment.

Recording my first song with Four Tracks had me grinning from ear to ear. First I recorded “drums” with my mouth in a beat box style. I then took my acoustic guitar and recorded the main chords of the song. I then followed that up with some guitar doubling and embellishments. Finally I played a lead guitar line over the 3 recorded tracks and completed the song. Perfect for quick and simple musical idea notation. I could also see this being used for recording a one man comedy talk show of sorts to get all the parts correct.

There are some caveats though. Four Track allows you to record using the iPhone’s built in microphone or a headset microphone but you absolutely must use headphones during recording or you won’t be able to hear tracks that you’ve already recorded. That means you can’t just record one track into your phone using the built in microphone, then try to record the next track without using headphone because you wouldn’t be able to hear what was already recorded. I believe this limitation is due to the amount of feedback you would get while recording. The built-in microphone and speaker are so close to each other that it would cause too many problems but this is the same for most real studio situations as well. You don’t want feedback or bleed through when recording.

The audio playback is very, very soft when played through the iPhone’s built in speaker. I’m not sure why this is but using headphones solves this problem.

Lastly, I wish for a way to BOUNCE tracks! Bouncing tracks is a studio recording term for taking tracks that have already been recorded and recording them to another track to make room for more music to be recorded. Unfortunately Four Track is unable to do this at the moment, but it is on the drawing board for a future release.

Overall Four Track is well worth the $9.99 price tag especially since I get to carry my 4 track machine in my pocket. What will they think of next?