Do phone videos treat drums as noise?

S

Stickman

Silver Member
I’ve often wondered why phone videos of live performances hammer the sound of the drums.. in most cases the drums are pushed low in the mix, the snare sounds dead and the cymbals sound mushed into a tinny ball!

I have a theory but not sure..
I was looking at a video a friend shot from a Recent gig - he was on a boat about 70’ away.. we were playing on a dock for about 100 boats for an annual event. They had a great PA and the drums were all mic’d - sounded great on ‘stage’ and had glowing reports as to how great it sounded on the lake.
But the iPhone videos were disappointing drum wise - the vocals and guitar were clear and way up in the mix.. the drums were way back in the mix- barely audible! Funny - it picked my hi hat foot and that wasn’t even mic’d! Then I noticed.. when he panned the camera around the lake - the drums suddenly jumped into the mix! So when he was facing away 180 degrees from the band the drums were crystal clear.. I was relieved to hear that it was the phone and not our PA mix...
I googled phone video/audio.. and it seems there are 3 mic s on the phone
Front video - top front mic for audio and with back mic Doing noise cancellation
Back video - back top mic for audio and front mic does noise cancellation
So.. he was shooting front video.. and when he turned away from the band the drums suddenly got picked up .. so by noise cancelling ‘the band’ it recorded an accurate sound of the drums! Weird or what?

Seems like these phones do some weird filtering and treat drums as noise! Anyone have any other explanations?
 
My phones mic is on the bottom, next to where I hold the phone when using the camera. My hand blocks the direct path of sound that I am filming. If I turn away from what I am filming, my hand now acts as a cup directing the sound into the mic.

Remember, the mic is how the phone picks up your voice. We talk at the phone from the front, not the back.
 
Depends on your phone, really.
Mine (iPhone 10sMax) has noise leveling to where I don't hear that unless the volume is above what the phone can handle. Sometimes the whole thing will sound "muddy", but all the instruments sound that way, not just the drums.
 
The noise cancellation trick only works when your mouth to noise ratio is large. In other words when you are very close to the phone. But with distance there is almost no difference to the arrival times of a sound source. So it doesn’t work much at all in this case.

However the biggest problem with phone audio when recording music is the automatic gain control. It’s great for speech as it evens out loud speech with quiet speech. But what happens when recording drums is it turns down the initial hit and then turns up the sustain level. So recording a cymbal for example is a complete distortion of the actual sound.

If you can shut the AGC off in your phone that would be a big help. Unfortunately you cannot do that with an iPhone.
 
The problem with phones is that they use an automatic level control a.k.a. compressor. Loud sounds are squashed and quiet sounds are blown out. This pumps up the sustained sounds like guitar power chords, droning basses and screechy vocals, and kills drum transients.
 
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