Piano Recordings
April 19th, 2009
Prelude in C♯ Minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
In December I had my first piano recital in nearly two years, and so I started to look into various methods that performers use to conquer performance anxiety, something which causes me a lot of grief. Lately I’ve been hanging around with a number of friends involved in Cambridge’s thriving local music scene, and so not willing to go the beta blockers route I started thinking about doing some recordings. This way not only do I get to hear what the audience hears but it also reproduces some of the pressure that comes with performing for an audience. The audiofile above is my first effort, a recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C♯ Minor.
Ok, nobody’s ever going to sign me up for any recording contracts and there were a number of dodgy chords in that last section but I thought it was pretty good for a first effort. It was recorded in one take and I haven’t added anything else since the whole point of this exercise is as practice for a live performance.
Kit
I spent a little under £200 ( excluding the piano and the laptop ) on the recording kit, from Digital Village in Cambridge. I used an Alesis IO|2 stereo mixer attached to a laptop running a cutdown version of Cubase that came with the mixer, and a couple of cheap microphones stuffed down the piano cabinet and secured with parcel tape. The piano is a fairly largish Kawai upright.
