Help in becoming a recording artist

[schubertiad]

I am about to be immortalized... My music school audition has to take the form of a cd of roughly 20 minutes of playing. After changing my repertoire choice several hundred times, i've got a list of pieces which i'm happy(ish) with. I am applying for a non-degree program at the shanghai conservatory, so the required standard should hopefully be lower than for a full degree, but i still can't completely screw the thing up. Since they just want to hear if i can play a bit, i don't think a very varied program is essential, but i'm still trying to tick most of the boxes. The pieces i have in a reasonable state are:
poulenc b flat minor novelette
bach e major p+f (bk 1)
mozart a minor sonata mvt 1 (just about learnt)
chopin berceuse
chopin nocturnes no.9 and 10
scriabin etude op.8 no.2
Note that the above program would take around 25-30 minutes, so i will use the pieces which turn out best on the day (or days, i may do a couple of sessions).
I have to hand a cd to the school by the end of the month, which gives me about 2 weeks to polish things and record them. My problem is that while every section of any of the above pieces is quite solid, but playing faultlessly from start to finish is pretty much impossible. I would love to give in some undoctored, single take performances, but am not above resorting to 'cheating' if i have to. Can anyone who has spent time in recording studios give me some advice? How many hours would you suggest booking the studio for? How many wrong takes before you give up and try something else? How long before you become completely drained? How easy is it to splice 2 recordings together? Would 3 short sessions be preferable to one longer one?
Thanks in advance

[richard black]

Audition CDs are generally supposed to be undoctored. My slightly cheeky outlook is that leaving a couple of minor duff notes in the recording makes it sound unedited, even if that's not the case. But basically, speaking as a habitué of recording studios in almost every imaginable capacity including pianist, I'd say if you know the pieces pretty well you should get 25-30 minutes of music laid down in 3 hours. Editing is easy once you know how but it is a skill and one that's not trivial to acquire. I'd advise against 3 short sessions: it takes most people at least half an hour to get into the swing so you'd be wasting that times three.

[dan101]

I did my audition session for my master's degree program in a day (approx. six hours). However, I did record more music than you intend to. You probably need about four hours. My session was very draining and it did cost a fair bit. It's also part of the reason I now record myself with my own equipment. 

If you are the type of person that gets into a groove or 'on a roll', then do it in one session. If, however, you need time to reflect and adjust your strategies, then break it up into two days, with less time each day (if the recording studio is willing to schedule as such).

Don't worry about a bit of 'splicing'. Most people do.

[kevink]

Ask yourself this question when considering whether or not to doctor your recording:

"Would I prefer to succeed dishonestly or fail honestly?"




I answered, "fail honestly," so I have never edited my recordings.  It doesn't matter how common editing is; each person must ask himself the same question.  Each must decide if he'd be happier cheating to win or losing with honesty... of course, the only way to win with honesty is to risk losing that way, too!

I'm a better person and a better pianist for not ever editing my recordings.  I tried harder than those who edited and allowed themselves frequent mistakes.  And I did win honestly :-)

best wishes,
Kevin

[schubertiad]

That is an interesting point of view kevin, but i'd venture to say that being accepted into the conservatory, practising like mad, and keeping up with the demands of the course would be more beneficial than failing to get in and going it alone...

[gaest]

That is an interesting point of view kevin, but i'd venture to say that being accepted into the conservatory, practising like mad, and keeping up with the demands of the course would be more beneficial than failing to get in and going it alone...

Unless you get in under false pretenses and are not up to the level they expect, which will lead to years of being overstressed as you try to match up to what they expected you to be able to do from day one. 

But that's your decision. 

[shingo]

Hi Schubertiad,
     I am sure you are much more experienced than I am and will not suffer many of the troubles I have encounterd when trying to record myself but if you require some words of wisdom Bob offered me some good advice in a thread I made that was simmilar to yours 'Here'. Obviously the psychological pressure regarding the nature of your CD is infinitely greater () but the jist should be similar  .
     One piece of advice which sounds fairly straight-forward is try not to get frustrated whilst in a session as this (for me anyway) killed my ability to perform for the rest of that session without a 5 min break to cool off mentally. So its best to just relax and stay calm if you can, much more productive.
     Good luck!

[cygnusdei]

What do you mean by 'editing' or 'doctoring' ? If you have several takes of the whole session is it dishonest to mix and match? Same thing as as having your photos taken isn't it?

[Bob]

I thought audition recordings were supposed to be uneditted, one full take.  I've heard of tapes being thrown out because someone heard an edit.

For CD recordings, I find myself moving more and more toward a "whatever" attitude.  I used to think make it as pure as possible, but then again, if you're creating a CD, it's a CD and not a live performance, and it is still your work, your creation.  What's important in that case is what the listener gets out of the CD, not whether it's perfectly true so much.

Although for an audition CD, I think there's an expectation that you can play just like the recording sounds.  They would know of course that those are your best takes.  I don't think they expect a perfectly created recording, but I have heard of people doing their audition recordings in a professional studio.  The audition listeners would be looking for the same thing as any other audition, except the format's a CD. 

You can always ask too, although I would think a professor would tell you to just send a tape and don't worry about it much.  Good presentation is still important and still makes an impression regardless of what they say though. 

I would go for a pure complete take.  That doesn't mean you can't split the piece up though, play different movements at different times.

Do your best preparation and decide how many times you want to sit there and play it at a performance level.  Doing it once it one thing, but if you expect to have five takes of each, then you're expecting yourself to be able to concentrate at your highest level for that amount of time.

I did one and I think I reserved an hour for 20 minutes of playing.  Some of the pieces I got the first time.  Some I still didn't have after the third time but had to give up.  And I still had time to record another take of the one I nailed the first time just in case.

[schubertiad]

Thanks for the responses. In an ideal world I would do everything in complete takes (that may yet happen) but I am also preparing for the possibility that things go horribly wrong on the day and i have to salvage what i can from the wreckage. Obviously if they wanted a video, I would do no editing. Since they have asked for a CD I will do what I can to give them the best CD of my playing. What I don't want to do is send them something which is unrepresentative of me, but is rather the result of an off-day which I can't do anything about. I will be recording next week, and will post what i've done in the audition room. What i may do is present 2 versions - one edited, one unedited - and find out which people think would be the better one to send off.

[richard black]

Everything that you can possibly imagine happening to recordings does happen to them, right up to recording isolated notes. I have corrected individual wrong notes on a recording (long after the artists have left), jacked up the pitch of flat singers and violinists on the odd note, changed speed of portions or the whole, inserted notes that were never played, even corrected misprints in the score - all on the stereo master recording.

In a sense none of this matters on commercial recordings because all we're trying to do is produce an artefact that people will enjoy listening to, but in terms of artistic purity I can  say with certainty that I have never turned a musically duff performance into a great one: the most I have done is make a musically decent performance more accurate.

The same is true, really, of audition recordings: you can make yourself sound a little more accurate by retaking those awkward scales/arpeggios/leaps until you're happy, but you can't turn yourself from a bad pianist into a good one. Still, if the people listening to the recording are stupid enough (and it's a fair bet plenty of them are) it may help you get into college, for what that's worth.

Do bear in mind that our expectations of accuracy and cleanliness in recordings are often different from those in live performance, too.

[jpowell]

Richard speaks sense as usual, and I can vouch for his immense experience in this area having working with him and many of his colleagues on innumerable occasions.

All I can add is that if a listening panel could hear an edit, then it was a really bad edit.

And if any of the listening panel were professional recording artists (most of them won't be), they wouldn't either allow bad editing on their CDs, nor would they themselves almost ever be satisfied with any complete take of a relatively challenging piece made under studio conditions.

It never ceases to amaze me that when, on rare occasions, I scan down the list of "professors" (they're just teachers really) on conservatoire piano faculties, and then start typing the names into, say, Amazon, how few of them actually have commercially available CDs to their names. And some (mentioning no London instituitions), have heads of faculty who haven't even given a concert -- let alone made a whole CD -- in decades. And people want to learn how to perform from these guys.

What a funny world we live in ...

[jinfiesto]

Powell, you're absolutely right. As long as you have a competent recording engineer, the edit will be absolutely invisible. I do some recording engineering work on the side, and it does take a while to get a good edit, so from a cost perspective, I think I would try to keep the number of edits you want to a minimum. On the other hand, for some of your pieces you may consider splicing. I don't feel this is cheating, because you're still playing the piece, just in smaller sections. If this is an option, and personally, you should look into it, especially for the Mozart, since according to you it's not finished, you should definitely go for it. If you're going to do it that way, sit down with your engineer, and work out exactly where you're going to stop etc... However, it's important that you are able to start and stop at almost the same tempo you were at before. Because of this, I usually find it easier to record in overlapping segments, cut them to size, and then splice them together. Just my two cents.

[mattgreenecomposer]

Schubertaid,
I have a small recording studio and run ProTools and will tell you that anything is possible.  I can edit any wrong notes, insert time, change pitches, add dynamics, pedal,  any thing you can think of with just a few clicks of a mouse and there is no way it can be detected on a cd.  A good recording engineer (and I'm not even that good) should be able to really help you.

On the other hand, they're gonna find out once you get there so you might just want to give them a "live" recording and hope for the best.

[tompilk]

i think this is one of the most interesting threads i've read.
I'm also interested in how recording studios work but have no experience whatsoever. I'd love to see or help out. How do i get involved in this sort of thing? I doubt they let inexperienced people near the studios...
I live near Manchester, UK if any of you know anywhere near me that does such a thing... perhaps i could contact them and do some voluntary work or something?
thanks.

[kevink]

Ask yourself this question when considering whether or not to doctor your recording:

"Would I prefer to succeed dishonestly or fail honestly?"




I answered, "fail honestly," so I have never edited my recordings.  It doesn't matter how common editing is; each person must ask himself the same question.  Each must decide if he'd be happier cheating to win or losing with honesty... of course, the only way to win with honesty is to risk losing that way, too!

I'm a better person and a better pianist for not ever editing my recordings.  I tried harder than those who edited and allowed themselves frequent mistakes.  And I did win honestly :-)

best wishes,
Kevin

That is an interesting point of view kevin, but i'd venture to say that being accepted into the conservatory, practising like mad, and keeping up with the demands of the course would be more beneficial than failing to get in and going it alone...

I think you might not be giving my question as much weight as it deserves.  This issue of whether or not to edit your audition recording is not just about getting into a conservatory; it's about what kind of life choices you'll make.  Success without honesty is really no success at all, and yes, it would be more beneficial to fail rather than succeed where one hasn't the ability to succeed without cheating. 

Splicing multiple takes into one recording is not representative of you as a pianist.  If you're concerned about having an 'off day' in the studio, consider this: you might just as well have had an off day at a live audition.  If you are not happy with the prospect of spending all that money only to be disappointed with the results of your performance, practice harder.  The conservatory has asked you to prepare an unedited CD. 

It's true, the playing field is not level; the majority of your competition will probably edit and splice their recordings.  But you cannot choose how they live--you can only choose how you will live.  And so I admonish you not to be satisfied with artistic dishonesty.

"The rules of art are the same as those of morality."  --Robert Schumann

[schubertiad]

I think you might be a tad self-righteous there kevin...
Your position is extremely easy to adopt provided there is nothing on the line. However, when faced with the prospect fulfilling a life-long dream things are clearly not so straightforward. If we consider the way today's professionals approach recording, then clumsily putting the first half of one take with the second half of another would be considered wholly honest by today's standards. As has been stated in this thread already (both by professional studio technicians and recording artists) any studio recording will be cut, pasted, sped up, slowed down, butchered and mutilated beyond recognition. Perahia's (prizewinning, no less) recording of the Chopets even cut out 2 bars of music (op.25 no.11). Oops!
You might say that this is expected of studio recordings, so fair enough.
However, even live recordings can be just as dishonest. Nigel Kennedy, in his sleeve notes for his recording of the Beethoven violin concerto, spouts on about how phony most recordings are, and gushes about the virtues of his live recording. Then he shoehorns in the fact that it is mixed from TWO live concerts, not one. Even worse, the great Horowitz released some 'live' Scriabin which had been assembled from A DOZEN!! concerts. And some bars are still not right...
These are the standards set by professional musicians, most of whom graduated from music schools far more prestigious than the one I'm applying to. (I won't even be an undergraduate - It's a non-degree program.) To hold me to an entirely different standard is a bit strong I think.
I am not conning the conservatory. I am not deluding myself. I am not denying any other musicians a place. I just want to show a music school my best side in order to unofficially study, paying out of my own pocket. I started this thread looking for practical advice, not because of a crisis of conscience....

[kevink]

I think you might be a tad self-righteous there kevin...
Your position is extremely easy to adopt provided there is nothing on the line. However, when faced with the prospect fulfilling a life-long dream things are clearly not so straightforward. If we consider the way today's professionals approach recording, then clumsily putting the first half of one take with the second half of another would be considered wholly honest by today's standards. As has been stated in this thread already (both by professional studio technicians and recording artists) any studio recording will be cut, pasted, sped up, slowed down, butchered and mutilated beyond recognition. Perahia's (prizewinning, no less) recording of the Chopets even cut out 2 bars of music (op.25 no.11). Oops!
You might say that this is expected of studio recordings, so fair enough.
However, even live recordings can be just as dishonest. Nigel Kennedy, in his sleeve notes for his recording of the Beethoven violin concerto, spouts on about how phony most recordings are, and gushes about the virtues of his live recording. Then he shoehorns in the fact that it is mixed from TWO live concerts, not one. Even worse, the great Horowitz released some 'live' Scriabin which had been assembled from A DOZEN!! concerts. And some bars are still not right...
These are the standards set by professional musicians, most of whom graduated from music schools far more prestigious than the one I'm applying to. (I won't even be an undergraduate - It's a non-degree program.) To hold me to an entirely different standard is a bit strong I think.
I am not conning the conservatory. I am not deluding myself. I am not denying any other musicians a place. I just want to show a music school my best side in order to unofficially study, paying out of my own pocket. I started this thread looking for practical advice, not because of a crisis of conscience....

The legitimacy or illegitimacy of editing performances for public release is debatable.  The illegitimacy of editing performances for the purpose of an audition is not. 

These are the standards set by professional musicians.......To hold me to an entirely different standard is a bit strong I think.

The standard to which you are held for your audition CD is dictated by the institution to which you are applying.  Submitting an edited recording is against the rules. 

I am not denying any other musicians a place.

You're trying to artificially augment your recording in order to gain a place that otherwise might go to someone else.  Since you are doing this with the belief that it will improve your chances of landing a spot in the school, you have to concede that you're unfairly reducing the chances for someone else, who has not doctored his recordings, to land the same spot.

Since editing recordings requires money and a lack of scruples, you're essentially slanting the playing field so that those who are more honest than you are, and also those who have less money to spend than you do, will have a harder time competing with you.  Feel OK with that?

I started this thread looking for practical advice, not because of a crisis of conscience....

...so now I hope you and anyone else who is reading this thread with intentions similar to yours is confronting a crisis of conscience.  There is one at stake whether or not you are aware of it or want to deal with it.  I know it wasn't your intention to discuss this when you started the thread, but... well, the internet's a beautiful thing, ain't it? 

I think you might be a tad self-righteous there kevin...

I'm sorry if you feel I'm being self-righteous.  My posts are intended not only for you but also for anyone who happens upon them... so please don't feel that I'm personally attacking you.  I'm trying to lay down a stance on an issue that you brought up, and so far I haven't seen anyone seriously putting my concerns to rest.  My first question, for everyone reading this, still stands: would you rather succeed because you cheated, or risk losing because you chose to be honest? 


One last:

Your position is extremely easy to adopt provided there is nothing on the line.

The same could be said of every morally defensible position.  Find out if your desire to study at this particular institution at this particular time more important to you than the life-long pursuit of integrity and goodness.  There's more on the line than you seem to think...

[gaest]

Also, to chime in on what kevink's saying:

Sometimes, no matter how terrible it feels, failing is the best thing that can happen to you.  I know you don't want to hear it with your dream filling your head, but there is no such thing as only one chance.  The only thing holding you back is your imagination, or lack thereof.  Meaning:

What will truly happen if you don't get picked up by this conservatory?

Is there another conservatory you could apply to?  If not, why not?  Why does it have to be this one conservatory?

What is it you really want to accomplish at this school?  You say you're not going on a degree path... if you're not planning on getting a degree from this conservatory, then are there no other options if you're not accepted?

If you're not accepted, can't you wait a year and apply again, using the extra time to prepare even more?

You don't have to answer any of these questions here if you don't want to, but you should definitely be thinking about them even as you prepare to audition.  Not getting accepted doesn't mean you're through for life.  Instead, it's a perfect opportunity to find out what you're lacking in skill-wise, and improving on it.  There have been plenty of opportunities in my life that I really worked towards and wanted to achieve, and sometimes I didn't.  It always feels bad at first to not immediately achieve your dreams, but that doesn't mean you can't achieve them ever.  It just means that you're not ready to right now.

So I'm going to have to agree with kevink here.

There is no meaning to success if it is won in an underhanded manner.  And taking the easy way out through cheating is a very bad habit to start.  At some time in your career you'll reach a crunch time which you can't fake your way out of, and by then it might have reached the point that you literally can't recover from.

I'm not trying to be self-righteous here either.

I'm just telling you that if your dreams are worth achieving, then they're worth all the work you can put into them.  And there's absolutely no self-esteem boost like reaching your goals through pure hard work, determination, and honest skill. 

Good luck, whatever your choice.