Recording Tips

[Rhtyhmic_Thunder]

Hello everyone,

I'm a euphonium player in high school (junior year) and am preparing for my first real audition; a wind ensemble that's organized by a spectacular college in my area. Because of the current situations brought by Covid-19, I will be sending in a recording of my playing and I just had a few general questions of how to approach this. I'm unsure of what kind of space to play in and what I should use to record myself (I currently use my phone for social media but it sometimes overloads the mic and messes with the playback). I was just hoping I could get some input on what to do.

Thank you all in advance!

[davewerden]

Welcome to the forum!

If this needs to be a video, then consider the advice below along with trying to find a reasonably decent-looking background. It's not critical, but it makes a better impression.

You need a good acoustic environment if possible. Some church's have this, or a school auditorium (not a gym!) can be good.

The most crucial points are to control the record level yourself (as opposed to a recorder that adjusts it automatically) and to have a quality microphone. This blog post has information on equipment you can get at a couple different budget points:

http://www.dwerden.com/forum/entry.p...r-Good-Quality

This is similar to what I do, but in my case I record audio and video on different machines. Then I have to sync the audio and video, which is a little painful. But it lets me kill the camera's audio, which is inferior. If you need only an audio recording, then it's simpler!

If you can't find a good room to record in, then you need to put the mic about 6" from the edge of the bell, sort of in line with the bell's flair and pointing at the bell. That will give you a clean sound, but it will be dry. You can use a program like Audacity (free) to add some reverb to the mix (carefully!) to make it sound more real.

If you need video, note that many camcorders like the one linked in the post above let you use a manual mode, where you can set audio levels yourself. You can plug a good mic into the camcorder and not have to worry about the sync issue.

[Rhtyhmic_Thunder]

Thank you so much for the swift response and the advice!