<p>I have been wondering for a long time how people go about taped auditions.
What kind of equipment do you use? Do you rent a studio? What about video auditions, do you rent special equipment? If you use a regular video cam, do you use an external microphone to enhance the sound?</p>
<p>It just seems like it's difficult to get good quality video and audio material without having to pay for studio rental, specially when it's really hard to have all the material ready at one time if you are applying to multiple summer programs and such.</p>
<p>I would love to hear your experiences with this and what you would recomend.</p>
<p>My S uses his H2 Zoom for summer program audio recordings. </p>
<p>The only video recording we ever made was for D’s application to St. Olaf 3 years ago, and a summer program for her 2 years ago. We first paid someone to video her in a church, and the recording was awful. So we hooked our minidisc up to our (analog) camcorder, and went with that. Not great by any means, but all we had. It was enough to get her a nice scholarship at St. Olaf, and the following year, got her into her summer program.</p>
<p>At the summer program, I got the idea that perhaps many folks use more sophisticated means. One of the coaches mentioned specifically to her that he enjoyed her DVD, and liked seeing her living room, too. (Which was an odd comment, since she stood in front of the piano. We took the picture down, so it was only a blank wall. All you could see was a portion of the piano. Not sure how he knew it was in our house.)</p>
<p>There are quite a few threads on here discussing this topic. Here are a few for you to look at:</p>
<p>In our case, I needed to create an NFAA audition DVD for my D and, as luck would have it, our old camcorder was toast. I bought a new Canon camcorder that both recorded to an SD-HC card and had a microphone input port. </p>
<p>I borrowed some better-quality mics and a small mixer from a community chorus and got the use of a small local church for one evening. </p>
<p>Since the camcorder recorded in a computer-compatible format, I was able to easily create the DVD and also rip the audio tracks to create pre-screen CDs.</p>
<p>I suppose that “quick 'n dirty” version of how I did all that might be a little scary to those who are not technically oriented but, honest, none of it was at all difficult to do once you get familiar with the tools.</p>
<p>We went the easy-but-more-spendy route - one of the teachers at D’s music school does recording on the side, so she just set up some times with him and an accompanist, and voila! Viola CDs and DVDs magically appeared on our doorstep.</p>
<p>I’ve posted before about the recordings, but I think the one thing that has not been touched upon is mic placement. You can have the greatest location to record in and the best equipment, but if the mic’s are in a bad spot, it will sound horrible. There are times I do a job and am told by the conductor where they want the mics (and I’ve sure learned not to argue), I just hate to produce something that sounds like it was made in a bathtub.</p>
<p>A few “secrets” - For clasical, choral, vocal recordings I use Rode NT2 microphones…not the NT2as - the older ones that can be had on ebay for imo cheap and they rival Neumanns. Piano is tougher - there are many ideas as to how to best mic them and we’ll leave it at that. I used to use portable Dat drives and mixers, but now I use an ipod touch, an Alesis protrack (which is an audio dock for the ipod) a $10.00 software app from the Itunes store call FiRe and a free service called soundcloud. When I get home I just dump the wave files into a wave editor on a mac (or pc) and convert to cd format</p>
<p>As for mic placement for most instruments about 6 feet from the player and depending on the location 4’ to 8’ high. Mics are spread 14" apart straight on. You’d be surprised as to how different a recording can sound when the height of the mics is changed for different takes.</p>
<p>As for the video - A video camera with an audio input is best, howver you need to be aware of the level coming from the source. Many times the cameras can not handle the sound level and it needs to be cut way down with an inline volume control (radio shack - 6 bucks)</p>
<p>You can also take the cd audio and “weld it” to the video, with applications like iMovie or Final Cut, but getting everything sync’d just right can be tough and a patience tester.</p>
<p>If by the strangest chance you’re in or around North East Ohio,the retired recording engineer that I help out from time to time does the audition recordings at a very low cost.</p>
<p>Best of luck. Hope all this info helps. Feel free to PM
JD</p>
<p>Some schools specifically state that the recording does not have to be professional quality for prescreens. I think that advice probably applies to all schools for prescreens. If the recording is to replace a live audition, then I would go with very high quality, but for a prescreen, as long as the sound is reasonable, then I think it should be fine. The picture quality is not nearly as important as the sound quality.</p>
<p>We did choose to hire a musician who does recording on the side. He was reasonably priced and knowledgable about classical music recording. We initially set up two recording sessions in an acoustically appropriate church, but ended up doing just the unaccompanied works in the church and went to the accompanist’s home for the accompanied stuff. If we had not needed videos for three schools, we would have just used our H2 Zoom which produces excellent audio recordings.</p>
<p>I used our Canon videocamera for video recordings, and made a simultaneous audio recording using some mics that feed into a cd-recorder at her local music school. Total cost besides the accompanist was therefore just a few dollars for the CDs and the videotape. I know families that spent thousands on professional pre-screening recordings, and some who made the recordings in their own homes. We chose the middle ground and used a good hall with decent acoustics (which luckily we were able to use at no cost), but spent next to nothing on the actual recordings.</p>
<p>About external mics with the video camera. I actually purchased a mic, recommended by my brother in law, who is an audio engineer (unfortunately he lives in British Columbia and we live in Philadelphia.) But when I listened to the input though earphones there was a horrible hissing sound so I ended up using the mediocre internal video camera mic instead of the external mic. I would definitely recommend, if you are using a video cam with external mic, that you listen though headphones so you don’t end up with a botched recording and have to do the whole thing over.</p>
<p>glassharmonica: I don’t know if the mixer eliminated the hiss you report, but I didn’t have that problem with my recordings.</p>
<p>Just a Dad: I had three channels in the mixer so I put the left and right about 3 feet in front of my D and the third on a pad on top of a music stand behind the piano and fed it into the center channel. Since the piano was about 20 feet from the singer I was able to keep it from overwhelming her voice. The distance between the singer and her mics allowed the room’s resonance to get recorded…almost to the point that I worried someone would think I’d sweetened the recording afterward.</p>
<p>My D just video recorded for summer programs on our canon camera in the living room. She then uploaded it to her Mac and created a DVD with idvd. It turned out fantastic, the quality was surprisingly good. In years past we’ve paid up to $600 for professionals to video record, and there really is not too large of a difference. Do they even watch these tapes in entirety? We go into it assuming that they do, but one has to wonder. Thoughts?</p>
<p>I doubt that most recordings are listened to in their entirety. I have no evidence as to what summer programs or conservatories do, but I have had to listen to many student recordings. </p>
<p>Even at a live audition, I understand that it is rare to hear all the required works and that only excerpts are usually heard from the works that are heard. I think that the auditions are often about 15 minutes (and often less) and many students have over 40 minutes of required repertoire. </p>
<p>When listening to a performance, once a solid opinion has been formed, it is much easier to turn a recording off than to tell a breathing student that the audition is over. I am sure that many recordings reveal clearly sufficient ability or an appalling lack thereof within a minute or two. Those inbetween probably get a longer listen.</p>
<p>Don99… “sounds” like you did a great job with what you had. I’ve done the three mic mix many times, usually the orchestra or choir in the background gets the stereo pair (at about 15’ up) and the soloist gets one that can be offset a bit left or right to create the right musical balance via panning that mic which is at the lower height etc, mentioned above. I would not worry about the acoustics sounding “sweetened” What may be concerning is if you had four recordings of the same piece and created a fifth “take” with Logic or another audio editor and then added some echo effect. If someone at a school took the time to convert a cd like that back to a wave file and new what to look for “artifacts” could be seen… Oh I get those requests, thankfully not to often. Sometimes if I want to sweeten or warm up a recording I’ll add a pair of small tube pre-amps and adjust the gain on those off the mixer output before it hits the recorder</p>
<p>Depending on the mic, three feet may be just right or a little too close… If you play the recording in the car, home stereo etc and are happy with it and your D is as well that’s what matters. It’s very challenging to sit with consumer headphones on and get the results you want. For those interested the AKG K702 headphones are great for recording and listening to Classical, Acoustic and some Jazz. They are the only set of headphones that I’ve ever used that sound as if a set of high end speakers are being listened to, rather than a set of cans. Sennheiser’s are also great, but the AKG’s at least to my ears are a great value for the cost.</p>
<p>Lastly imo the biggest thing to know about all this is that with most digital recorders pushing to 0db or above can result in distortion. It’s easy to increase the volume of a recording by boosting the overall amplitude when your done, but digital clipping during loud passages can ruin a recording. Try peaking at or below -5db and you’ll be fine…</p>
<p>Now my question to the group, and yes I am trying to be funny here- what did schools do for audition materials before cd’s? - ask that vinyl pressings be sent in, reel to reel tapes or maybe cassettes… I found one summer camp that said they would accept any format since they were totally techie…hmm time to get out my old 8 track…
Best
JD</p>
<p>Thanks or all this information!
Using a church sounds like a great idea and I can’t imagine that it’s too difficult to get the permission to use it.
Also, the recording sound and video separately sounds great (our video camera doesn’t have a mic input) but the mixing is a little bit beyond my skills, I think.
My daughter recently had to do a taped audition and we did it in our living room, with the mic from the camera. On top of that, the audition was to be uploaded to utube and there was a limit in the size so we had to compress the recording, hopefully affecting mostly the video and not so much the audio…
I think, in retrospective, it would have been better to just cut a DVD instead of uploading.</p>
<p>I’d like to record a DVD with our Pansonic MiniDv (PV-DV400D). After reading all the threads and becoming more confused, I bought two external mics but I’m not sure which to use.</p>
<p>Option 1 is a Sony ECM-MS908C Electret condenser mic that fits on top of the camcorder.</p>
<p>Option 2 is a Shure C608WD dynamic cardioid mic that is for karaoke that I would put on a stand in front of DD.</p>
<p>I need DVDs for summer program auditions now and prescreening dvds in the fall and mixing/dubbing/synching is currently beyond my skills. I hook the camcorder to the tv DVR and transfer it and let the DVR burn the dvd. </p>
<p>any simple advice for a non-technical parent?</p>
<p>If those are the only options, suggest that you use option 1. You’ll be best off with keeping the mike off the camera (just find the right extension cable), otherwise more than likely camera noise will be in the recording. Perhaps attaching the Mic to a tripod about 6’ from your D level with her neckline (should avoid “pops” from p’s etc that way).</p>
<p>Camera does not have to be straight on with the mic visible imo and you could then compose the video frame as you see best. Experiment & test is best until you are happy with the result. </p>
<p>Note that once you have a DVD made you can always put it into a PC or a MAC and just rip the audio from it, if only a CD is required. There are plenty of free apps out there to do this. If you need a suggestion for this just PM
JD.</p>
<p>No fuzzy cover needed if you are indoors - those are designed to cut down wind noise outdoors. Mic should be a good 3’ from the camera. Cable is cheap so getting 20’ is not a bad idea. If you are recording in a church remember to experiment with her position (on the stairs of the altar, I’d assume) to get the acoustic benefits right. You would be surprised what a difference the placing of the performer can do.</p>
<p>EDIT: The following two paragraphs were posted before I noticed JADIO’s reply, this paragraph afterwards. Yes, getting the Sony off the camera would be better yet. You don’t need a fuzzy cover, but you may need a pop screen if you use the Shure close in. That would probably cost more than the mic itself in this case. By all means experiment with placement of both the singer and the mic - both make a huge difference in the result. The length of extension cable should be such that you can put the camera where it will do the best job, then do the same with the microphone. Normally, the mic is going to be closer to the singer (anywhere from a few feet to perhaps 10 or 15 feet depending on circumstances) and the camera a bit farther away. A 20’ cable should do the trick quite a lot better than an 11" cable. Try to keep the mic as far away from walls, floors and ceilings as you can - at least as high as the singer’s head and a bit higher if possible. If in an older church built before electronic sound reinforcement was commonly used, you might also see what the sound is like from a pulpit if they have one. Sometimes that location shapes sound in ways you don’t want, but sometimes they figured out how to make that a real sweet spot.</p>
<p>Given the two, I would probably try the Sony first. Note that you will want to mount the camera on a tripod and avoid touching it while recording. Mics that mount directly on the camera can be very prone to handling noise. If you hold the camera by hand, it will require that you stay very still indeed while taping or you will get lots of unwanted thumps in the audio. Camera placement will be critical. You need to get the mic the right distance away from the singer (this will vary a bit with the size of the voice and the acoustics of the venue) and hope that the camera’s zoom can compensate to get the picture that you want. It would normally be better to use a mic on a stand that can be placed independently of the camera, and that brings us to the Shure.</p>
<p>The Shure is intended as an inexpensive vocal microphone for low budget sound reinforcement and karaoke. It is normally used as a handheld microphone held pretty close to the singer’s mouth. Using it further away from a larger voice may not work so well because that is not what it was designed for. The lower frequency response in particular is going to be weak in that case. Even at its best, it is not all that good of a microphone. If you do go this way, you are probably going to wind up with the microphone in the picture right in front of the singer’s face.</p>