I never thought the iPhone would be something I could use for nostalgic purposes, but I recently found a little application which turns it into a 4-track recorder. You’ve got record, stop, play, forward and back, with level and pan for each track. That’s it.

I sat down with the acoustic for guitar and the phone for a few minutes the other night to test it out and managed to come up with a nice little ditty. There’s something very liberating about limiting your technical options. I usually write music on the main studio PC, and while it’s very flexible, it’s all too tempting to start worrying about how the thing sounds. Switching the musical hat for an engineering cap, if you will. It’s hard not to start thinking along those lines given my day job, so removing that option completely for songwriting is a nice way to get into a more appropriate mental space.

In other news, my limited edition bonus-DVD version of Frost*‘s new album arrived, so I’ve been listening to the supplied instrumental mixes of the album. Very interesting to listen to all the details that are hiding beneath the vocals, and it seems to be a lot less agressively mastered as well.