Recording a Digital Piano with your iPhone

This one’s a bit obscure, so unless you happen to own a digital piano with USB connection, check out some other posts instead 😉

We recently bought a Kawai digital piano, so I immediately started playing around with the midi features the piano has. I was pleased to discover it works right out of the box with GarageBand and a MacBook connected via a simple USB cable. 

  
However, I wanted to be able to do the same on my iPhone 6s Plus, since I prefer GarageBand on the iPhone for quick recordings. 

It turns out that the old trick of using the Digital Camera USB adapter (which is designed for the iPad) still works. Mine is the old 30-pin version, so I also need a Lightning adapter, giving me this fairly ridiculous, rube-goldberg like setup:  

  
But it works well and makes recording piano super simple. Note that it’s a midi connection, so you can also go in and fix mistakes (ahem).

You can still find the old 30-Pin Camera Connection Kit on Amazon.com.

The newer Lightning to USB camera adapter should also work, but I haven’t tried it yet.