Hey everybody! It feels weird to post again after such a long time, but let's see how this goes...
I wanted to update all of you on a new project I've started this summer. Besides all the work on excerpts, solos, and orchestral parts that I usually do over the summer I wanted to do something to keep my ears and section awareness up, since I'm going to summer music festivals this year.
The project I've given myself is to record many of the famous horn section parts, that are likely to pop up in the final rounds of most auditions, all by my lonesome. I'm hoping that this will help me to get me used to listening for multiple voices so that I can hit the ground running when I get back to playing in my ensembles in college.
After one week of working on this project I can already tell that my ears have had to work a lot harder telling my face how to truly play in tune. I think this sort of project would be good for many people that are stuck around the house a lot during the summer because it's also incredibly fun creating these recordings and hearing how the process progresses.
What You'll Need:
I wanted to update all of you on a new project I've started this summer. Besides all the work on excerpts, solos, and orchestral parts that I usually do over the summer I wanted to do something to keep my ears and section awareness up, since I'm going to summer music festivals this year.
The project I've given myself is to record many of the famous horn section parts, that are likely to pop up in the final rounds of most auditions, all by my lonesome. I'm hoping that this will help me to get me used to listening for multiple voices so that I can hit the ground running when I get back to playing in my ensembles in college.
After one week of working on this project I can already tell that my ears have had to work a lot harder telling my face how to truly play in tune. I think this sort of project would be good for many people that are stuck around the house a lot during the summer because it's also incredibly fun creating these recordings and hearing how the process progresses.
What You'll Need:
- Recording software
- Microphone
For the software I use a free software called Audacity. It's a really user-friendly program that allows you to set up a click track and just press the recording button for each separate track you need to create. As far as the microphone goes, you can probably get away with the microphone that's installed on most laptops, but personally I use the clip-on mic that comes with SmartMusic. For that clip-on mic I clip it on kind of behind my hand on the bell. That way you're not getting a "raw" sound, but the mic can still pick up all the little nuances.
Since I'm still getting back in shape after a two week break from the horn I decided to start out with a more lyrical section excerpt. For this week I choose Weber's Der Freischutz. It's famous excerpt in terms of coming up in a ton of auditions and it's also short, lyrical, and in a good range. I could work on playing in tune with a good sound instead of all the technical stuff such as high range and fast notes. Below is the finished project, and even though there are still a few rough notes, it's a good starting point for this project. This recording took me about 2 hours total of time (not counting the time that I took to work out each individual part) to put together. Enjoy!
Please feel free to leave any comments or critiques, and if you want to make sure that you hear all my recordings your safest bet would be to subscribe to my YouTube account. Since, as you can tell, I've gotten pretty bad about posting. But I'll to make sure to keep posting at least each Sunday when I have another recording done. Thanks!
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