The iZotope Spire Studio is a standalone recording studio that’s portable and easy to use, but can it handle recording a guitar amp and how good can it sound?
Having a full time job as well as being a father of two small kids, I don’t have much time or energy at the end of the day when it comes to recording. The desire to be creative and to share information that I wish I had however, continues to drive me to create videos on the gear that I find interesting. This means that I typically record using just the mic built into my iPhone 6s, not exactly the best for recording an amp at volume, but better than not recording. However recently a comment on YouTube brought in to sharp focus my recording technique. I was asked why some videos (like mine) didn’t sound as big and lively when recording the Two-Rock Bloomfield Drive, and I knew the answer came down to the lack of using a close mic and room mic to give a better mix and representation of the sound in the room.
Enter the SM57 close mic and iPhone room mic test, which successfully proved that some additional setup time could make my videos sound much bigger and crisp. The downside was cables strewn across the room and an annoying walk to setup and start recording, like trying to run a recording managing a recording desk in a studio while also performing in the live room, ugh. I’ve tried other solutions such as a Zoom portable recorder, or a usb interface with long cables, but ultimately I didn’t like having to set and adjust levels using headphones to monitor. Hopefully the Spire could be the solution.
Portability means I leave my mics in place and grab the Spire when I want to record. A high quality built in stereo mic means I can close mic the cab with the SM57 but also get excellent room sounds at the same time straight to the same DAW for mixing on the go (which is conveniently done on an iPhone or iPad wirelessly). The built in mic is high quality and does an excellent job of handling the output of a 40 watt tube amp cranked. The “Soundcheck” button gives me the one touch level setting that I always though should be on all interfaces, especially cheaper ones aimed at home recorders. Hit it and play for ten seconds or so and it sets the input levels to match your peak levels so you don’t clip, while also optimizing the track based on what it thinks your using to record (guitar, voice, etc). Mix the tracks using the graphical mixer, export in any number of formats (including mixed individual tracks in wav format for importing into a video editor), and you’re set to go in your video software in minutes.
So far the only real complaint I have it the way your phone connects to the Spire. You connect your phone to the Spire’s inbuilt wifi signal, which is fine and allows for high data rates, but which means you need to disconnect and reconnect to your home wifi before you transfer final mixes to a cloud location. The lack of USB port for file transfer from the Spire to a computer seems like a huge oversight as it would make for a great computer conferencing mic as well, but would also just make it less painful to transfer the large zip files created when sending multiple tracks of wav files.
I’ve only recorded one video so far, but it seems to be less painful than any other solution I’ve tried so far and the results are pretty good. But don’t just take my word for it, check my video and see what you think.