How Musicians are Using the Tascam Portacapture X6 as a Tiktok Audio Hack

Whether you're a musician posting your music on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or any other social media platform, you need to sound your best if your posts are going to gain any traction. Your fans can be more critical of audio quality than video, and consistently capturing high-quality audio for social media is a challenge every musician faces. Alexander Spiers is one such musician whose music posts are getting noticed due to their exceptional audio quality, and his secret audio hack for social media videos is simple — the TASCAM Portacapture X6 portable recorder.

The Portacapture X6 is a smart audio hack for TikTok creators because it enhances your sound in a big way (well beyond what your smartphone can produce) without adding anything complicated to your workflow. The means you can keep posting consistently while also delivering top-notch audio with every video, without having to learn how to operate a recording studio. Let's take a look at how Alexander Spiers uses the Portacapture X6 to make music videos for social media, and hear how it can upgrade the sound of your content in a big way.

Setting Up for Success

Alexander Spiers' setup for recording his music for social media is as simple as it is effective. Equipped with just the Portacapture X6, a camera tripod and mount, and his iPhone, Spiers is able to set up and record TikTok videos just about anywhere. While the Portacapture X6 features XLR inputs to connect whatever microphone you'd like, Spiers chose to simply use the built-in stereo condenser microphones to make his videos. And while the Portacapture X6 can be used as a USB audio interface, Spiers recorded directly to SD card in the spirit of simplicity (audio was synced to video easily in post production). Recording to SD card also means Spiers is ready to record anywhere fast, with no extra cables or interface configuration to deal with.

Spiers also tapped into the Portacapture X6's built-in music apps for optimizing his production quality. In his videos Spiers uses the "Vocal" preset to add some room reverb for subtle ambience. Other than that, you're simply hearing the sound of the Portacapture X6's built-in microphones capturing Spiers' voice, his Martin 000-15M acoustic guitar, and some outdoor ambience.

Check Out the TikToks

To demonstrate how much of an improvement the Portacapture X6 makes over his iPhone microphone, Alexander Spiers created this TikTok video which switches between the Portacapture X6 and iPhone audio (the black and white sections are the phone audio, the color sections are the Portacapture X6 audio). You can easily hear the added complexity in the midrange, bringing out the warmth and harmonic complexity of both Spiers' voice and his acoustic guitar. The high frequencies are smoother and clearer too, adding the professional sheen that's missing from phone-created TikTok videos.

@alexanderspiers The Tascam PortaCapture X6 @TASCAM USA @zZounds #fyp #tascam #musiciansoftiktok ♬ original sound - Alexander Spiers

There was no further processing done on the audio during post production: Spiers simply synced the audio to the video. All of these videos were recorded only with his iPhone and the Portacapture X6, demonstrating its prowess as an audio hack for TikTok creators. The audio quality is obviously superior to phone-recorded audio even when you listen on smaller speakers, and the difference is stunning when you hear it on studio monitors or headphones.

@alexanderspiers Testing out the @TASCAM USA PortaCapture X-6! @zZounds #musiciansoftiktok #tascam #acoustic #acousticcovers #fyp #foryoupage #guitartok #indietok #lucyrose original sound - Alexander Spiers

@alexanderspiers Evening on the back porch. #paperkites #bloom #dearest #musiciansoftiktok #acousticcovers #phoebebridgers #acoustic #ceilings original sound - Alexander Spiers

@alexanderspiers Socks go hard. Not to be too emo, but this is kinda how life feels sometimes.#rustonkelly #fyp #acousticcovers #acoustic #musiciansoftiktok #foryoupage #guitartok #indietok #tascam #martin @Martin Guitar Co. original sound - Alexander Spiers

Enhance Your Sound with this TikTok Audio Hack

While Alexander Spiers' TikTok videos showcase how easy it is to enhance your sound with the Portacapture X6, he barely scratches the surface of what it's capable of. Features like worry-free 32- bit float recording, application-specific presets for instant sonic optimization, and the intuitive app-like interface are outside the scope of Spiers' basic demonstration, but it's definitely worth mentioning that they greatly add to the Portacapture X6's superior recording experience. Countless musicians like Alexander Spiers are discovering that achieving a new level of sonic excellence is easy with the TASCAM Portacapture X6 — if you're looking for an easy way to improve the sound of your social media videos, you need to check it out!

You can hear more from Alexander Spiers on TikTok and Instagram.