Blog #12: Reading Reflections for 10/5/2009

Articles referenced in this blog entry: “Capturing Your Sound: A Guide to Live Recording" By Time Clukey
“Tips and Techniques: Picture This” by Scott Watson
“TIME Technology Strategies” from Technology
Strategies for Music Education

I felt very discouraged after reading Clukey’s article about how to record school ensemble performances. I completely agree that recording students is an essential component of an adequate music program today. The second article by Watson mentioned that kids love hearing recordings of themselves, and this is so true. Providing recordings is a prime motivator for our students and essential for teaching them how to evaluate their own musical progress. However, Clukey promised at the beginning of his article that the procedure for recording concerts could be both very understandable for the educator and inexpensive for the educator’s budget. At no point in his writing did I feel that either of these statements were true. The author mentioned device after device after device necessary to record performances and the total expenditure was a few thousand dollars or possibly much more. I was also very unfamiliar with every piece of hardware, software, and procedure that the author reviewed. There were many words in the article that were left undefined such as Phantom power, LED meters, normalization, platform-specific wave form, and several others. I felt that Clukey’s discussion was way over my head which terrifies me as a future educator because I know that the ability to work with this technology is essential. I think I need someone to walk me through the process of using this equipment because I don’t believe I’ve ever handled any of the items mentioned under the ‘Building Your Recording Kit’ side bar on page 28. The author did note that local music stores can help teachers evaluate fair prices for the equipment and hopefully I’ll be able to utilize such local resources.

The information about setting-up the equipment did make some sense to me. I think that if one is going to expend the effort to produce a recording of a group’s performance, he/she might as well aim for a quality product. It is imperative that mics are placed far enough away from the audience so that general noise from the hall is not picked-up but also far enough away from the performers to ensure that sounds coming from all sides of the ensemble will be picked up. I’ve heard many band recordings where one microphone was obviously too close to a specific section, or even worse, too close to one specific player! It would be helpful for the director to schedule a sound-check and allow time to experiment with microphone position. It seems like the best situation is when the ensemble can rehearse in the same hall they perform in. The Wind Symphony and Wind Ensemble I played in during my undergraduate work was able to do this so our director always had an accurate concept of how each piece would sound for the final performance. Even if the ensemble doesn’t rehearse in the same place they perform, having one performance venue would still familiarize the conductor with the reverberation and echo of the hall.

After reading the recording section of the document; however, the process of setting-up and tearing-down does seem extensive and time consuming. A busy concert week is always to be expected, though. However, the truth is, professionals go to school and earn degrees, even graduate degrees, in sound recording. I’m worried that I won’t have the resources to learn what I need to know about creating a polished recording. The editing (‘Postproduction: Transfer and Processing’) section of the article also put me at a loss. I feel completely unqualified to complete this kind of audio editing. I do not feel the author was speaking to someone on my level.

I did really enjoy Watson’s article, however, which explained how to visually display the sounds of student instrumentalists. Classes of beginners would love this and I completely agree with the author. Most people are visual learners and seeing the sound that they produce would illustrate the concepts of expressive style in ways that no other method could. The results would be incredible. It seemed like it might be difficult to have an entire group of beginners huddled around a computer to see the resulting sound waves, though. I liked Watson’s description of demonstrating first on one’s own instrument, displaying the “correct” picture on the computer screen, and then asking students to attempt to match it. This is an incredible form of feedback which allows students to see the differences between contrasting styles.