Create Inexpensive Professional Recordings On Your iPod or iPhone

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (WXYZ) - A professional recording studio generally occupies a couple rooms and contains thousands of dollars in equipment. Or it can cost $4.99 and occupy a tiny fraction of an iPad.

$4.99 is the cost of Apple’s Garage Band , a powerful app that can turn an iPad or iPhone into a fully functioning recording studio. Tom Limbaugh is a professional guitar player and instructor from Ferndale, Michigan. He created a professional quality recording on his iPhone once just so he could say he did it.

I enlisted his help to provide a lead guitar track on my iPad recording of Elvis’ “Blue Christmas”.

Even though I had Garage Band already loaded onto my iPad, I needed a way to get guitar and vocal tracks into the iPad. That’s where the $79.99 Griffin GuitarConnect Pro comes in.

Griffin project manager John Alexander is based in Nashville and, like just about everyone else in that town, is a guitar player. He says a lot of his employees are musicians, so the GuitarConnect Pro is a natural.

“I have a wife and kid and I don’t want to disturb them.” John says.  “It’s really easy for me to take the guitar connect pro plug it into my iPad, pull up Garage Band, queue up a good mix and sit and play guitar and in a corner of the house and not disturb anybody.”

I plugged my guitar into the GuitarConnect’s ¼” jack and laid down a 100% noise free rhythm track. Then plugged in a microphone and added a vocal track. Then using Garage Band’s synthesized instruments I added a very realistic upright bass and Hammond B-3 organ.  Tom Limbaugh topped it off with lead guitar riffs.

The sound quality is exceptional and even an amateur musician like me had little trouble creating a respectable recording. You can hear the recording and watch a bonus holiday video of Blue Christmas here .