hearing yourself in the mirror

I’ve been working up a bunch of repertoire outside of the orchestra over the last several weeks, and it finally got to the stage where I had to commit to one of the most terrifying things a musician can do: I recorded myself.  If the average person is more terrified by the prospect of public speaking than death, then most musicians would rather be drawn and quartered than have to play into a recording device and then force themselves to listen to what they’ve wrought.  It’s much like actors who cannot stand to watch playbacks during shooting, or to see themselves up on the screen.  You see/hear (pretty much) only the worst of what is happening.  I’ve gone through the exercise of telling my students to come up with two positive feedback items for every one negative observation.  Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to come up with just one, but I remind myself that I’ve always had positive things to say about every musician I’ve ever heard play for me, so I can’t be the lone exception to this rule!

I have to admit that playing into a recording device (I keep wanting to say tape recorder, but I have one of those new-fangled Zoom H2 audio recorders that has no moving parts, it just records to an SD card) makes me almost as nervous as playing for fellow musicians, which is absolutely the worst, even if they (actually, especially if they) are your good friends.  So, anyway, I survived, and some things pleasantly surprised me while others reinforced misgivings that I already was forming.  And this is why recording one’s self is so important: it forces you to objectively assess your progress, and know where the subsequent work needs to be done, and where your remaining time needs to be spent.  There’s no substitute for it.  Unfortunately.