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Today, let’s focus on improving significantly in 10 minutes or less. The secret: recording yourself, listening critically, and making an effective, creative, and durable change. It works!

Many people have written about the value of self-recording in the practice room. Here’s a terrific argument.​I’ve written before about how I use recording in my practice.

Why do I consider self-diagnosis a creative act? It combines active and objective listening with comparison against some notion of how something should be (a mental representation). It requires thoughtful and responsive ears, a deft touch with adjectives (try and come up with 5 specific words to describe your playing after hearing a recording), and the ability to determine a specific course of action based on what has just been heard. Sounds like creativity to me!

Get Better Quickly in 10 Minutes

Pick a spot to practice. Record yourself. Listen three to four times and make smart notes. I listen first for musicianship, and other big picture ideas, then for timing, then for intonation or tone quality, and finally for accuracy. I proceed along 2 paths from this point.

• If you have a clear idea of what this passage should sound like, check your recording against your mental representation. Give yourself specific, detailed notes. “It sounds bad” is both poor grammar and poor analysis. “Eb in measure 5 is sharp,” or “consistently missing jumps between a 2nd and an octave in measure 2” is better, but still not great grammatically.Then, make a smart, quick, repair, tackling one issue, using every practice technique you can think of.
• You hit all the right notes, but something sounds off. If you don’t have one for this passage, but know something is not quite right, proceed with Option B, inspired by Design Thinking:Brainstorm potential issues. Prototype a variety of changes, interpretations, or other variants. Try these quickly, and assess the effects. Perhaps inventing some exercises around the musical material can help focus your ears and hands? Then, proceed, circling back to option A.

This technique has been transformational for me over the past 25 years. There are, though, many other scenarios in which we can record ourselves. A few pertinent examples:

Practice Performing

1. Choose a medium-sized chunk of music. Record yourself, and listen back, making specific comments on trouble issues. Categorize these problems: are these randomized occurrences or consistent? Small things (missed notes, bad transition), or systemic—a lack of dynamic contrast or tendency to compress fast passages? Make notes on the limits of your dynamics, tempi, character. Are they too narrow, too wide? Is your timing perfect?
2. Make a change, using the techniques outlined above. Tackle consistent issues first, then think about the larger issues.

I like to record in the medium scale because it helps me tackle performance anxiety. When we practice, our goal is to think critically about our own playing, diagnosing issues and planning our next steps. When we practice, that immediate feedback is a recipe for disaster. We can hone our performative skills by putting ourselves into “performance” mode, knowing we have our recording to help my critical thinking later. Over time, one can quickly enter this reflexive performance mode more readily. On this point, using a medium sized chunk is essential. Too often we practice our performance skills by making full runs of pieces. This is akin to jumping from a warmup to a marathon, with no smaller races in between. Not a great idea.

Performance Review

Goals:

• Compare your memory of a performance to how it actually sounded.
• Learn how to account for acoustics: timing, timbre, instrument choice
• Refine the effectiveness of your portrayal

How-To:

Listen back to a concert performance, comparing your memories of the event to the recording. Does it sound the way you imagined? If not, what is different? Orchestral players will frequently use their colleagues or recordings to help hone their sound in different acoustics, calibrating their sense of their sound up close with the reality from hundreds of feet away. In chamber music, I find listening to a performance at a later date can help me calibrate my interpretations: did that moment land the way I wanted it to, or was my inflection too small for the space?

What You Need to Record

Microphone

My setup is stereo mics with audio interface and either Logic or Live. I prefer recording into software rather than to a standalone recorder because I like being able to quickly edit audio, loop passages, and compare against previous recordings while using visual and software inspection of waveforms as a quick check of my precision and consistency. On the road, I typically use a Zoom H4 or H6 for quick and dirty recordings.

If the goal of our practice is to refine and develop our sound concept, we need good output as well as input. Either good headphones or good monitor speakers can help you make quality decisions about your sound. Peabody’s list of recommended equipment is a good jumping off point if you’re just getting started.​

The Ability to Slow the Recording Down

I like to slow down my recordings to more accurately assess issues. Although most DAWs can change tempo without impacting pitch, Ableton Live’s warping feature is perfect for real-time adjustments. Transcribe! works wonders as well, although importing sound files into the program can be just slow enough to discourage me from using it.

Look at those waveforms!

Easily accessible tempo change

Warp!

Notebook/Practice Journal

Keep track of your practicing, your assignments for yourself, and your recording notes. I combine this notebook with my repertoire learning charts to keep myself on track.

Why No Video?

I typically record audio only in my practice sessions. Why? Video can lead to unnecessary bias. We have a tendency to listen with our eyes, saying that a passage sounds a certain way because it looks a certain way. It opens the door for dogma, and it’s a slippery slope towards the kind of narrow-banded thinking which cripples specialists. That kind of subjectivity is the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve when we record ourselves.

Happy practicing!

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