Hey! Special edition of Podcastage! I received quite a few comments asking me "Can you record an external microphone on your iPhone?". The majority of these comments were on my SF-920 review video, so that's the mic I decided to test out. I will walk you through the adapter and app that I used, and some of my warnings and concerns.

The iPhone has a single 3.5mm jack on it. This jack is a TRRS plug, which stands for Tip, Ring, Ring, Sleeve. What this jack allows you to do is transfer audio in and audio out on a single cable. That is all well and good, but if you want to record a different mic than your stupid iPhone headphones mic, then you're out of luck. Until NOW! There is a $7 adapter that splits this jack into two jacks; a headphone out and a microphone in. This allows you to plug in your headphones, and plug in a separate mic!

In this video, I test this out by using the the Voice Memo app on the iPhone. It seemed to work fine, but here are my concerns.

You cannot change the microphones input gain on the phone. Therefore, you will need to monitor the input closely and change your distance to the microphone accordingly. You can also use a microphone that has a gain control on it, like the SF-920.
I do not know what kind of voltage the TRRS plug provides, so I cannot guarantee that all microphones will work using this method. I can almost guarantee that the most condenser microphones will not work using this method.

That's what I found on my first test of this method. I hope you learned something or found the video and article helpful. If you did, go ahead and give us a thumbs up and subscribe on youtube. If you have any more questions leave them in the comments down below. Talk to y'all next time.

I have received comment after comments asking me if the mics that I test out are capable of recording music and sounding good. Rather than testing all the microphones I have tested, I selected 3 to test out. The SF-920, the NW-700, and the SM48. All of these mics are $30 or less and I did a couple tests on them.

I recorded an overdriven guitar with the mics (I should note that the amps volume is not very loud).
I recorded a clean guitar with the mics to show you more of what the mic is capable of doing on an amp.
Lastly, I recorded a Ukulele to show you how this thing functions with acoustic instruments.

To sum up, I believe that the Neewer NW-700 performed the best on the clean guitar and acoustic instrument, and the SM48 performed the best on the overdriven guitar. However, if either of these mics are out of your price range, you will probably be okay picking up the SF-920. So the answer to "Can You Record Music With a Cheap Mic?" is YES!