So, I got to thinking that most every piano student is very familiar with the recital experience and all its inherent challenges. But how many get recording experience? It's a very different kind of music making, with challenges very different from live performance.

Yesterday, I began a recording project for my students, where, within the confines of their lesson time, they could lay down tracks for an edited version of one of their pieces. Most of my students are dismayed by their inability to play note perfect during recitals, despite my assurances that note perfection is not an objective. So why not give them a chance to produce a note perfect performance the way all recording artists do?

This first result is by a young student who plays as a hobby but still suffers crippling anxiety at the prospect of wrong notes.

I myself find recording is even more challenging than real life performance because if there is any mistake, it can be heard again and again. So when I record myself playing, I try hard to play mistake free and the music does suffer noticeably; too rigid. I could hear that rigidity in your student's recording as well.

What recording setup do you have? The sound is very good.

The biggest challenge I think for the first-time recording pianist is to keep the bigger picture in mind, while she records sections large and small to be edited together at some later point. It's hard to have a conception of how the music is shaping up when you've done multiple takes of several different passages. All my students involved in this project will suffer another restriction: completing their recording within their lesson time. This doesn't seem like a big deal for a piece under ten minutes, but I myself have spent entire afternoons on ten minutes worth of playing.

I'm using a pair of Shure SM81s in an X-Y configuration inside the piano, run through an Alesis Multimix, which serves as an external USB sound card to my laptop, recording audio to Cubase LE. The final edited audio is processed with a convolution reverb and mastered via Ozone, which for the money is really the bomb.

Even when I do multiple takes, I go through the whole piece each take. But I guess that's not quite possible for your students to do that within the lesson time frame. I don't like the idea of cut and paste sections together to make one whole piece because you can't do that in a real performance. Even doing multiple takes is kinda pushing it. LOL