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Jesse,
Although I couldn’t spot it, I’m guessing the phone was somewhere on the “desk” on the stand. I was just checking it was visually in front of the band.
As you compare wave forms of the stereo vibe mics and your stereo phone recording we clearly see that the phone recording, which is further away from the noise source, the vibes, displays the start of the sound recording further to the right on the DAW tracks’ display. We’re basically looking at an X-Y graph. The X axis (horizontal) displays Time, the Y axis (vertical.) We’re looking at your handclap. For a white man in flannel, that is a pretty damn funky lookin ‘clap. It arrives at different times because the physical distance from the source to the microphones are different. The phone mics are further away physically so the sound of the clap (vibrations through the air) arrives later. Later shows up as a smidge to the right. View the screenshot… check? CHECK !
I’m going all science-y on the explanation here so as to provide backstory for those that may not yet understand tech. I’ve had 4 kids from the local college sound recording program shadowing me at the historic State Theatre this month and found a groove when I went really basic and broke things down to easily digestible nuggets.
So back to the original question …
The relative polarity of the phone recording to the vibes mics matters, especially if you slide the (later arriving) phone recording to align with the start time of the first arriving (vibes) signals. Find the first upward peak on the vibes, use that as your target. Find the first peak on the phone recording, if is downward facing..reverse polarity and the slide it over to the left to align with the first arriving positive peak of the vibes mic. Realize this is fucking time traveling magic. With the click and drag of a mouse, we rearrange time. Think about the poor bastards working at Stonehenge this weekend. As we fall behind with a quick digital reset, they’ve got to move all those big boulders one o’clock back.
I would first attempt signal aligning the phone recording with the mics, add a healthy level of it to see if that’s good au natural ambience, ie gentle wind, leaf crunching, geese, etc.
Another experiment would be to use the phone recording as the high passed send to a reverb.
re: milliseconds of delay
When combing two identical signals together but one is later, Inside of 20ish milliseconds they sound as one but with some tonal consequences. 50 milliseconds apart the two sounds will start to separate into two distinct arrival times. 100 milliseconds apart and you have arrived at Graceland, ie the “Elvis slap back)
Choose wisely