Communications

Since you are teaching private music lessons, or apparently are interested in teaching music lessons, I'm going to assume that you are an excellent musician, if not a performer, music major, or educator. Now I'm going to ask you a simple question; "Have you ever recorded yourself?" I'm going to guess yes. And if you did, did you find that it helped you hear things that you didn't hear before? In other words, did it give you a new perspective about your playing? Again, I'm going to guess yes.

Self recordings are a great way to analyze your strengths and weaknesses. However, the desire to listen to yourself critically is not something that comes naturally; it is something that requires nurturing. But why take the time and effort? What is the advantage of conditioning your students to make and listen to recordings of themselves? After all, aren't there enough fine musicians and recordings in the world already that can be used as examples of excellence in performance? Don't we want them to play like the masters? Is it really advantageous for students to listen to recordings of themselves? In my opinion, absolutely yes. I base this fundamental truth on several things, a few of which I mention below.

When beginners compare their early recordings with more current recordings you can just see the wheels turning in their heads. They are assessing the improvement they have made. In short, they are developing a sense of critical listening, and this is a good thing. Only by being critical at one's self does one develop into a better musician.

I will never forget the first time I was recorded. It sounded like I had a mute in my instrument! It was not what I was hearing in my head. Yes, from a technical perspective I was playing all the notes and rhythms and giving a reasonable interpretation of the music - but the tone! Where did the mute sound come from? It finally occurred to me one day that the reason the sound was so different is that I was hearing it from the inside, as well as the outside. When you play a wind instrument the sound will travel through your air passage into the inner ear. This adds a whole set of different vibrations and overtones to the sound as it comes out of the instrument. Needless to say, this started me on a quest to overcome the nasal quality of my sound. Some years later after an embouchure change, development of my breath support, and changes in my tongue position, I began to achieve a more characteristic trumpet sound. I only wish that I had heard a recording of myself years earlier and then maybe the problems would not have been so well established. Perhaps I could have been focusing on the finer aspects of playing, rather than working on correcting my basic sound. I guess you could say that this is one of the things that motivates me to encourage recording of students.

I find that especially where tone is the problem sometimes it's not enough to tell students that they are getting a pinched sound or a fuzzy sound or an uncentered sound or any other number of descriptive terms. Sometimes a recording is the only way for students to really hear what is coming out of the instrument. For instance, I had a student once who was getting an extremely pinched sound. I could, in almost every lesson, get him to produce a full, really good sound. But, from lesson to lesson he would continue to fall into the same unenergetic style of pinched playing. I even asked the parents to listen to him and remind him when he started to sound pinched, but they both had "tin ears" (their quote) and couldn't really hear the difference. In his case I started the recordings earlier than I did with the other students. I recorded him at the beginning of the lesson with a pinched sound, then at the end of the lesson after we got everything working right. I told him to listen to the difference every night before he started his practice. This is something the parents could and did do; make sure he listened to the recording every night. It still took a few months before the playing became automatic enough for him not to revert to the pinched sound. My point is, that without the recording I doubt that I could have convinced him of how much difference there was in his sound production. Where the student is not lucky enough to be able to produce a good tone at all, I will record the same passage so the student can hear the difference between his sound and the sound that we are trying to achieve. I've told you about the corrective attributes of recordings, but there is another reason that I use recordings... to motivate my students. When they compare older recordings, beginners become aware of previous mistakes that they now have control over. They gain a sense of success over how much they have improved, and this is important because on a day in, day out basis it is sometimes difficult to gauge any improvement at all, especially in the eyes of young students.

If they feel that very little improvement is occurring they begin to feel apathetic, then hopeless, and finally just give up. With a periodic look back at earlier recordings, students realize they are making progress, sometimes a great deal more progress than they ever suspected. This is good for the self-image and good for maintaining motivation in a process that takes many years of dedication. You will find that with time, the ability to use recordings for self-improvement grows. When introduced correctly it becomes an asset that will guide the student through years of excellence in performance. For this reason I recommend establishing a process for introducing recordings in your private lesson program and nurture it to the point that your students do this on their own. Believe me, your students will be more successful and motivated and that means you will be successful and motivated.

These days recording is easier than ever with all the free and low cost PC recorders and recording studio software packages on the market. Even the microphones that are built in to some laptops perform well enough for casual recording and for catching the "rougher" performances of a young student. Of course with your better students, or with students who are working on tonal concepts, a good quality microphone is recommended so that the fine nuances of tone production can be captured. I also recommend using headphones to listen to the recordings - they do a better job of blocking ambient sound and echo and reproducing the sound more authentically than most speakers. I will not get into suggestions for software and equipment here because that all changes so quickly. With a little bit of internet research you can come up with great equipment at a very reasonable cost.

So just how should you incorporate recordings into your lessons? I usually have a "recording week" once a semester. This way I manage to get to all of my students throughout the week. I generally try to do this just before a performance. That way my students have material they have spent a significant amount of time rehearsing. I also like to make a big deal announcing the recording date, as it provides just a little more incentive for polishing up performance pieces, which is just fine for music administrators, as well.

During my "recording week" I try to reserve the practice room with the best acoustics available. Sometimes an auditorium is available; this makes it even more special and I find that the added adrenaline often enhances the performance. I just use a quality microphone plugged into my laptop. I record either in MP3 or WMA format with the sampling settings set for a quality recording. The length of the recordings generally reflects the student repertoire, which generally reflects the level of playing. Beginners will only have short performance pieces, so those recording are generally about 1 minute. Second year students I might record for two to three minutes. Third year students three to four minutes, and so on. I locate all the recordings in a special folder on my laptop and use a naming convention for finding recordings easily. I use the first five letters of the last name followed by the first five letters of the first name, followed by the two-digit year, month and date (that way the recordings sort first by student, then in chronological order for each student). This way it's easy to bounce around comparing different recordings from each student. It also makes it easier to find the recording in order to email them to parents. You may be a little uncomfortable or a little "slow" the first time you use recording software, but stick with it; it becomes second nature quickly. I had doubts about losing valuable teaching time at first, but once you get going, very little time is lost and the results can be astounding. Some students really take it to heart and you see a huge change. If this happens to only one student, it's worth it.

You have heard me mention a software package called "PLSoft", from time to time. This software is designed for private teachers. The software itself does not contain a recorder, but it has a unique interface that actually allows you to launch four favorite programs from the main interface. This way your lesson timers and other functions continue to operate while you activate a recorder, a tuner, a metronome or anything else you might want to launch from one convenient private teacher interface.