How to film a guitar practice video with both iPhone cameras
A guitar practice recording usually gets watched for two different things afterward: whether your fretting hand actually did what you thought it did, and whether the take as a whole — timing, tone, the parts where you glanced down at the neck — held together. Those two checks want different shots. One wants your hand close enough that which fret you landed on is actually readable; the other wants your face, and ideally the whole instrument, in frame. A dual-camera recording gets both into one file at the moment you play, instead of two clips you would otherwise shoot separately and try to line up by eye afterward.
One thing it will not do is play a metronome click or a backing track for you inside the recording itself. DualCam composites two live camera feeds, not a pre-recorded track layered in from somewhere else — a metronome app or a backing track needs its own speaker in the room, and whatever it produces lands in the recording the same way your playing does: through the phone’s one microphone.
Frame the hand, not the whole room
A framing that fits your whole seated body and the guitar into a vertical 1080-pixel-wide canvas leaves surprisingly little of that width for the one detail a technique check actually depends on: where your fingers are landing. Zooming in afterward will not bring that detail back — a crop of a small, distant hand is still a crop of a small, distant hand, just bigger and softer.
Point the back camera at your fretting hand and the neck from close enough that individual frets read clearly, and let the front camera carry your face in the small picture-in-picture inset instead. If a session is really about posture or the whole instrument rather than finger placement, that calls for the wider framing instead — decide which check the recording is for before you set the phone up, because one framing rarely does both jobs well.
Zoom is live, which lens is not
Pinch-to-zoom works the same way it does in any camera app, and it works while DualCam is recording — a continuous, live adjustment within whichever back lens is currently active. Nudging in closer on your hand mid-take costs nothing and does not have to be planned in advance.
Switching to a different physical lens on the back camera — say from the standard wide lens to a telephoto, on iPhones where the lens picker offers one, for a flatter, more compressed look at the neck from further back — is a separate, heavier decision, and it is locked the moment you press record, the same as resolution. Settle on a lens before you start, and use the preview to check the framing first: what you see in the viewfinder is exactly what gets written to the file, so there is no need to guess.
Swap the main camera between your hands and your face
In a picture-in-picture layout, which camera fills the whole frame and which one sits in the small inset is not fixed for the whole take — it can be swapped while DualCam is still recording, the same as moving the inset to a different corner or resizing it. That makes a genuinely useful shape for a practice video: start with the front camera as the main frame for a spoken count-in or a note about what you are working on, then swap to the back camera as the main frame once you actually start playing, so your hand gets the full canvas instead of a cropped corner.
The swap matters because the two roles are not equivalent — the full-frame camera keeps its entire image, while the inset is a smaller window that can crop into the source depending on its shape. Whichever detail matters most to you at that moment in the take, hand or face, is the one worth having as the main frame, not the one left in the small window where a crop works against exactly the kind of close look a technique check needs.
One microphone, and no pause between run-throughs
A dual-camera recording writes a single audio track, not one per camera, and that track is whatever the phone’s one microphone actually picks up in the room — your playing, your voice, and a metronome or backing track coming from a speaker nearby, all mixed together at whatever balance the room happens to give you. There is no separating them afterward. For most practice review that is not really a problem, since you are usually listening by ear for timing and tone rather than trying to isolate one source from another, but it is worth keeping the speaker at a level that does not bury your playing.
There is also no pause button — recording runs straight through from the moment you press record to the moment you stop, so there is no way to freeze it between run-throughs of the same passage and continue later in the same file. That is not really a limitation worth fighting: play through once, stop, play through again. DualCam keeps every take in its own library with a thumbnail, so nothing is lost between attempts, and you can pick which one to keep afterward instead of judging it in the moment.
Common follow-up questions
Can I get a close, readable shot of my fretting hand and still see my face?
Yes — set picture-in-picture with the back camera close on your hand and neck as the full-frame shot, and let the front camera carry your face in the small inset. A wide shot that fits your whole body does not leave enough resolution to read finger placement clearly.
Can I switch which camera is the main view partway through a take, like starting on my face and moving to my hands?
Yes. Which camera fills the frame and which sits in the inset can be swapped while DualCam is recording, along with the layout, the inset’s corner, size and shape. It is a live control, not something you have to decide once and keep.
Will a metronome or backing track playing from a speaker end up in the recording?
Yes. A dual-camera recording has one shared microphone track, and it picks up whatever is happening in the room — your playing, your voice, and anything coming from a nearby speaker — mixed together, not on a separate channel you could remove afterward.
Can I zoom in on my hand while I am recording?
Pinch-to-zoom works live, within whichever back lens is currently active. Switching to a different physical lens, such as a telephoto, has to be decided before you press record — it is locked for the take the same way resolution is.
Want to just do this?
DualCam records the iPhone front and back cameras at the same time and writes one finished MP4 while you shoot. Free, no account, no ads, nothing leaves the phone.