My bass player quit over a phone recording of practice, so I switched how we tracked demos
Two guys I play with in a garage off Mulberry Street in Scranton kept fighting about our demo sound. We used to just set one iPhone on a folding chair in the middle of the room and hit record, and you could barely hear my Gretsch over the drums. The bass would disappear completely. I got sick of it after our third argument in a row, so I borrowed a friend's old Tascam 4-track and a single SM57 from the pawn shop on Lackawanna Ave for $60. I put the mic right on the kick drum and ran the guitar and bass direct through a cheap Behringer mixer into two separate tracks instead of one. The difference was night and day, even with the same crummy playing. My bass player heard the new version and actually said it sounded like a real band, which was the first nice thing he said in weeks. Anyone else here switch from a phone to even the cheapest tape setup and notice the low end suddenly showing up? What cheap trick made the biggest change for your practice room demos?