How to record band rehearsals on your phone
Most bands already record their rehearsals. They just cannot find the recordings afterwards.
The pattern is always the same. Someone holds up a phone for the last run of the new song, the file lands in the group chat, three people say "nice", and four weeks later nobody can tell whether AUD-20260713-WA0007.opus is the good take of the second song or a false start of the fourth. The recording was never the problem. The filing was.
So this is about both: getting a rehearsal recording that is actually worth listening to, with the phone you already have, and keeping it somewhere it can still be found when it matters.
The phone is good enough, the placement is not
The microphone in a mid-range phone handles a rehearsal room better than people expect. It is not going to give you a master, but it does not need to. You are recording so the band can argue about an arrangement with evidence, and for that the bar is "everyone is audible and the timing is honest".
What ruins a rehearsal recording is almost never the microphone. It is one of four things:
- The phone is on the guitar amp. Everything else disappears. If the phone is closer to one source than to all the others, that source wins by a distance that no amount of listening back can undo.
- The phone is in a pocket or face down on a table. You get a muffled recording of the table.
- Someone is holding it. Every grip adjustment is a thump, and thumps are the one thing phone microphones capture perfectly.
- The room is doing the mixing. A small rehearsal room with a lot of hard surfaces will smear everything into a wash. That is a room problem, not a phone problem, but the placement can make it better or worse.
The placement that works most of the time is boring: the phone at head height, roughly where a listener would stand, two or three metres back from the front line of the band, on a stand or a stool, not in a hand. Screen up, microphone not covered. If the drummer is loud (the drummer is loud) move a step towards the quiet end of the room rather than turning the drums down in your head.
One more thing that costs nothing: turn on flight mode. A call arriving mid-take is the most reliable way to lose the one run where the bridge finally worked.
Record the whole rehearsal, not the good bits
The instinct is to record only the takes you think will be good. It is the wrong instinct, for a practical reason: you do not know which run is the good one until you have heard it, and the run you did not record is the one everybody remembers as brilliant.
Recording the whole session has a cost, and the cost is that you end up with ninety minutes of audio containing four minutes you care about. That is the trade the filing has to solve. If your recordings are one long file per rehearsal, you are going to scrub through it once, never again, and you are back to the WhatsApp problem with extra steps.
The version that survives contact with a real band is: one recording per run-through, filed against the song it belongs to. Start it when the count-in starts, stop it when the song stops. You end up with a lot of short files instead of one long one, and short files are the ones people actually listen to.
That is the structure Band Companion is built around, and it is the reason the app exists at all. A take is not a loose file, it hangs off a song, which hangs off the band. The date is recorded for you, and so is the tempo the app detects from the audio, so a take arrives already labelled with the two things you would otherwise have to type.
What to do with the take, that evening
The half hour after a rehearsal is when a recording is worth the most, and it is also when everyone goes home. A few habits make the difference between a library and a pile.
Rate them while you still remember. Not a long review, just a rough sort. Three or four takes of the same song, one of them clearly better than the rest. Star it. Mark one as the final take when the band settles on a version. Six weeks later, "which one did we agree on" is a question with an answer instead of an argument.
Write the one thing you noticed. Not a report. One line. "Bass comes in a bar early on the second chorus." "This tempo is right, the other one drags." Notes attached to the song outlive the memory of the rehearsal by months.
Mark the spot, not the song. If the problem is at 2:14, put a bookmark at 2:14. Scrolling back to a passage you half remember is the friction that stops people from using rehearsal recordings at all, and it is completely avoidable.
The connection in a rehearsal room is bad. Plan for it.
Rehearsal rooms are basements, garages and industrial units. Signal is bad or absent, and any tool that needs to upload before it will save is useless in exactly the place you need it.
Recording has to work offline, fully, with no compromise: capture, save, play back, annotate, all on the device, and send it up when the phone finds a network again. Anything that treats the network as available is going to fail on a Tuesday night with a room booked for another twenty minutes.
This is worth checking before you commit to any tool. Put the phone in flight mode and try to record. If it complains, it is not a rehearsal tool.
How much space a rehearsal actually takes
The numbers matter because they decide what you can keep. Rough figures for compressed audio at a quality that is fine for rehearsal listening:
- A three minute take: around 3 MB
- A full two hour rehearsal recorded in run-throughs: 50 to 80 MB
- A year of weekly rehearsals, keeping everything: 3 to 4 GB
A year of weekly rehearsals, keeping only what you starred: a few hundred megabytes. That gap is the argument for pruning, and it is why rating takes on the evening matters. Not to save money, but because the library only stays useful if the ratio of signal to noise stays high.
For reference, Band Companion gives a band 200 MB free, which is enough for a few months of selective keeping, and 10 GB for 10 euros a month per band, which is enough to stop thinking about it.
What changes when the recordings are findable
The point of all this is not tidiness. It is that a band with a searchable history of its own rehearsals argues differently.
You stop having the conversation about whether the tempo of the second song has crept up, because you can play the take from February next to the take from June. A member who missed a rehearsal hears what was decided instead of being told about it. Somebody learning a part gets the actual arrangement the band plays, not the record, which is usually different in at least three places.
None of that requires a studio. It requires a phone in the right place, one file per run, and the discipline to spend five minutes filing before everyone goes home.
Related reading: what a band management app should actually do, how to practise a song at home with an A/B loop once you have the takes, and why a DAW is the wrong tool for this if you were about to reach for one.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an external microphone to record rehearsals?
No, not for rehearsal recordings. A phone at head height, a few metres back and on a stand will give you something everyone in the band can listen to and act on. An external microphone helps if you are recording something you intend to release, which is a different job with different requirements.
Should I record one long file or one per song?
One per run-through. A single long file gets listened to once and then never opened again, because finding the moment you care about costs more than the moment is worth. Short takes filed against the song they belong to get played repeatedly.
Can I record a rehearsal with no internet connection?
You can, and you should insist on it. Rehearsal rooms rarely have usable signal. Band Companion records and saves on the device with no network at all, then uploads takes and changes when the phone reconnects, and the screen tells you how much is still waiting to go up.
How do I stop rehearsal recordings from filling up my phone?
Rate the takes the same evening and keep the ones that matter. A three minute take is around 3 MB, so the problem is never one recording, it is two years of never deciding. Marking one take per song as the final version makes the decision for you later.
What is the fastest way to find a specific moment in a take?
Put a bookmark on it while you are listening the first time. Searching for a passage by scrubbing is the friction that makes people abandon their own recordings, and a bookmark placed once removes it permanently.