<p>jb, what a great idea! We have a really small house with mostly carpet, but one room has faux wood, so maybe he’ll do that. </p>
<p>You think we should stay away from a church, then? We do have a friend who will allow my son to record at his church, but I’ve never been there, so not sure what it’s like.</p>
<p>Since I’ve been getting a small bit of money from my very part time job, I sprung for a $100 HD recorder from Amazon. My son looked at it and thought it would be good. I love the idea of just recording whenever one feels like it.</p>
<p>How do you get it on the computer? (I know I sound so lame!) My friend uploaded my son’s videos to Dropbox and then I was able to easily get them up on Youtube.</p>
<p>compmom, that is a good point. My son’s energy is limited since he’s got so much homework with his three college classes this semester, but he does have Fridays off, so it wouldn’t be too much trouble. The pianist and her husband thought the video was fine. It’s the one school that only accepts audio that has me concerned because the audio only simply doesn’t capture what the video does.</p>
<p>cellomom, I was thinking of sending the video to his conductor since I think he’s supposed to be doing this solo with the orchestra in February. She could give him some good feedback. His teacher said one piece was good to go. The longer concerto he said was “85% of what you wanted”. </p>
<p>If this is a supplement for colleges, can’t you just use the piece that is good to go? I remember my daughter asking admission if she should cue her best 3 minutes, and they said absolutely. Colleges are not like conservatories in that they really just want to hear a snippet. We never figured out whether the tapes my daughter sent even went to the music dept. It may be that admissions just read her recommendation letters, looked at her music resume, and listened to 30 seconds of the piece she included.</p>
<p>Or did you get a request from colleges for a full audition tape?</p>
<p>Can you ask admissions how much music they want for their purposes? It may not be much… They could also tell you if the music dept. is likely to listen as well…</p>
<p>It depends on the acoustics of the church. Our recording from there was the best. Not every church is built the same. Their music director should be able to tell you if it is good or awful. One church in our town is where everyone goes.<br>
We have small children and they’d be running through the recording session in the only room suitable which is why we go elsewhere. </p>
<p>So one school says they want between 10-15 minutes worth of music of solo concerto or sonata that displays contrasting technique and expression. This was a school I thought took audio only, but they will take a Youtube link, after all.</p>
<p>Another schools says up to 10 minutes, and doesn’t have parameters. And the last two or three don’t have any set parameters, so I assume Youtube is ok.</p>
<p>So the question is, is the video good enough for the schools that are uber selective (10% or less admit rate). We know it’s good enough for the 30% admit rate school.</p>
<p>So you think my son should ask admissions about how much they listen to? I don’t want them to think he’s bugging them…He did already ask the one school about sending a youtube link (or links) and found out he could.</p>
<p>Good point, cellomom6. I’m hopefully talking with the music director today. </p>
<p>No matter what, y’all have given me a great education and I’m super excited to have a recorder that’s easy to work with (and hopefully easy to figure out how to upload stuff to dropbox).</p>
<p>In my daughter’s case, we asked for their sake not ours.I believe they asked for up to ten minutes but we asked if it would be easier for them if we just cued the “best” three minutes, and they seemed to appreciate it.</p>
<p>Your son could just send whatever is his best piece and not call, too. More is not better, in other words .</p>
<p>Ah, I never knew this! So he could just do one piece even if a school says 10-15 minutes? Ok, I’ll encourage him to email admissions and ask this. The one thing we did when we uploaded the video was to put the time where the cadenza is; that way, they can go right to it if they want.</p>
<p>Boy, I keep learning. Thanks a lot, compmom!</p>
<p>Colleges have an awful lot of applicants and are not specializing in listening to music, for the most part. The 10 minutes is, at least we thought, a maximum limit to keep the volume down. We are pretty sure they didn’t listen even to the three minutes! Not sure about the school that specifically wants 10-15 minutes and are specific about what they want, but the ones that say “up to 10 minutes” are going to want a really quick listen and will move on, I would venture to say. But double check. Maybe the music department really needs cellos and a prof, there wants to listen to a CD longer. So I don’t want to be responsible for telling you the wrong thing. In the case of our daughter’s schools, we figured admissions was busy and so gave them a way to listen efficiently.</p>
<p>We found that the conservatories and colleges we were applying to all used a third party service were applicants uploaded their videos. It was nice because once you upload to one or two services they keep them for you and we could pick and choose which ones to send where. </p>
<p>The do it yourself process was easy for me because I work in the A/V business and I don’t mean to make it sound like something everyone would be comfortable doing, but with iMovie high school kids have gotten pretty adroit at uploading video to computers and editing it. It was very frustrating for me to see other parents and kids going through all sorts of torture at the hands of third parties making money off of them recording auditions. But I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush; some of those recordists do a great job, it’s just that I hate to see the emphasis going to recording fidelity at the expense of a relaxed performance. By the time these videos get processed and squeezed down and put up on the internet to be played back on tiny speakers, the fidelity issue goes out the window. The professors have been screening kids for decades and usually can tell what’s up a with kid from a video unless the thing got totally trashed along the way. </p>
<p>BTW- Even though my daughter is in her second year at a conservatory she still has to submit videos for camps and she records them on the same old camera in the same wooden rec room we used to get her into her school and they do just fine.</p>
<p>Just make sure you get enough light in the video, and that can be harder than it sounds. I’m glad you guys are on to a good product with the Zoom recorders. In a rare misstep by myself I gave my daughter a too complicated Sony field recorder to take to school and her iPhone ended up working a LOT better. Ease of use is the most important thing for recorder at a school. Ease of use includes portability and ruggedness because at one point it’s going to get say on!</p>
<p>@jb1966, thanks for all the good advice. That’s great that you work in the A/V business! It does make things easier. It’s not that I’m a technophobe, but I am not a very fast learner when it comes to technology. For my oldest son’s arts supplement, I paid someone $10 to get it in the right format and upload it. Now with dropbox and updates to Youtube, it’s easy to upload. I just don’t know how to get it on the computer (yet; I just got our recorder today, so we’ll fool around with it this week before we rerecord on Friday).</p>
<p>I was thinking that professors know what’s what even if a recording isn’t the best quality; glad to hear confirmation of that.</p>
<p>That’s very interesting that your daughter still needs to submit videos for camps, but I am sure they are highly competitive, so it makes sense. What instrument does your D play and where is she going to school? Is she enjoying it? Did she pick it for the specific teacher(s)?</p>
<p>Re. the iphone videos, though no one in our family has iphones, I’ve seen videos of my son on Youtube made with an iphone and they look really good!</p>
<p>Just want to clarify that my comments pertained to college applications versus conservatory :)</p>
<p>My daughter (composer) forgot to change batteries or card or whatever (can’t remember) and thought her Zoom was recording a concert, but it didn’t. Luckily, a friend’s mother recorded with her phone. My daughter is still using the audio (doesn’t need video) from that phone recording in applications!</p>
<p>Paying someone $10 to figure out how to upload a video is money very well spent! A lot of the technical problems us old folks encounter with college audition recordings, etc. can be fixed by paying a high school student money to fix the problem. “Hey kid, here’s twenty bucks to turn my kid’s video into an audition piece.” Why not? </p>
<p>I wish I could find a student to compress and upload files for me. Even my son’s best friend who is into computers didn’t have a clue. Hmmm. I agree relaxed playing is better all around. Although, my son does have some concentration issues (adhd) and I found changing locations made it more official and helped his focus. I might have him do some practice runs without his brothers running through it. For summer music auditions, the maintenance man walked right through the recording ;(.</p>
<p>We had one summer-program recording session a few years ago when, just as the take was going perfectly… the (forced air) heat would kick on in the room we were recording in (which has nice, live sound), the dog would bark… the noon siren went off… and finally, a TRAIN went through on the almost-never-used tracks a half mile from the house, loud whistle and all… we finally got a good take by turning off the heat… which meant some crossed fingers as it cools down here pretty quickly during February in northern New England.</p>
<p>You guys are talking about problems that are common for anyone recording outside a studio. I’ve done a few records in my suburban house and I had to install a switch for the doorbell, learned to unplug the phones, etc. etc. But then there’s the meter reader, the UPS delivery, the dishwasher that somebody forgot to tell you was programmed with a delayed start time. It’s endless, but it beats $65 and up an hour at a studio that doesn’t have a live room suited for classical music ( that would be 99% of studios ) and an engineer that has just about as much experience recording oboe as you shortly will.</p>
<p>We finally had THE take going and out of nowhere a neighbor’s dog got loose and started barking in our backyard right at the last two measures. We used the take anyway and at least my kid cracked up as the last note rang out instead of getting mad. Figured is showed she had a sense of humor. When you get THE take, damn the torpedoes. </p>
<p>Video cameras almost all have automatic gain control (aka “AGC”), which will reduce or outright eliminate the dynamic variations you’re trying to capture. On better cameras, you can turn it off. I’d bet you can on that Zoom gadget, since that brand is oriented to audio recording generally.</p>
<p>Even if you get something professionally recorded, the guy doing the recording will likely apply compression to the signal.* Some may be okay, but there’s a reasonably good chance he’ll compress it more than is ideal for this purpose. In popular music, extreme compression has pretty much become the norm. Someone who does a lot of classical recording will likely have a lighter hand with the compression, but even someone who doesn’t will do what you want if you make it clear what that is.</p>
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<p>*I’m talking about audio compression: basically reducing the dynamic range of the signal. It’s often done at the point of recording (by putting an analog compressor in the signal chain after the mic preamp), then done again at least once in the digital realm.</p>
<p>Data compression (like what you do to make an mp3 file) is a different thing</p>
<p>Also: you can use a digital audio recorder that’s separate from the video camera.</p>
<p>You just need to dub the separately-recorded audio to the video using a video editing program. I think you can do that with Adobe Premier Elements, which is reasonably cheap, and you may be able to with other programs that are cheaper, or even free. Getting it synced is slightly tricky, though you should be able to do it by hand (and ear and eye) if you have to, by lining up the audio you want to use with the audio recorded by the camera in the editing program.</p>
<p>I’d beware of dubbing audio to video - the whole point of video is the program wants to be certain the person in the picture is making the music.</p>
<p>I would not try to dub a separate performance. I’m talking about dubbing audio recorded at the same time as the video, just with a separate device. That came up in an earlier post, where someone asked how you’d use an audio-only portable Zoom recorder if you don’t want to buy a video camera that has good audio capabilities.</p>
<p>Unless you’re using some bad or outdated equipment (like, say, a VHS-C videocam), the only problem it poses is the hassle of using an editing program to sync and dub.</p>
<p>Apparently, the person who’s helping us this time has a lot of fancy recording equipment, being that he’s a professional musician himself (pianist and singer), so we’ll see how it goes. I plan to use our new little HD, as well. </p>
<p>ThereAreLlamas, what should my son be telling this person? I guess the goal this time is to have the recording clearly highlight dynamics in addition to technique and intonation-basically, not so “flat” sounding.</p>
<p>Your last sentence is pretty much what you need to tell him. The main thing is you want to keep the dynamics, so use very little to no compression.</p>
<p>Oh yeah: and no auto-tune. But you knew that :)</p>
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