Recorded Auditions: What could possibly go wrong?

I remember waking up to the email from my teacher telling me to redo my audition recording. This was the 4th time, and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was.  It wasn’t the playing, the playing was acceptable, but the audio levels for my loud pieces were so soft and the audio from my soft pieces were really loud.  It made no sense…I had practiced tirelessly to make sure that I had the technique required to execute the dynamics and make a great recording.

The sound wasn’t right, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t edit the files to sound good.

What was the issue???? 

I had recorded on quality microphones, I had played with dynamic contrast, yet none of that was clear from the audio files I was exporting out of GarageBand.

At the time, I couldn’t figure out the issue, so I submitted my imperfect renditions to the audition and hoped for the best.  As expected, I was rejected. 

Needless to say, I was upset.  I didn’t understand what went wrong. The recordings sounded GREAT on my recorder, but as soon as I put them into GarageBand to make them into one track for submission, the sound was completely distorted.  

In a desperate search for answers on google I ran into a forum talking about the “auto normalize” button in GarageBand.  People called it the worst setting for live classical recording possible, and it was ALWAYS ON BY DEFAULT. It turns out the button was hidden in the audio preferences, where you wouldn’t look if you didn’t know it existed.

With the click of a mouse, the box became unchecked, and my recording sounded beautiful.  The dynamics were all there, just as they should have been all along. 

All the agony, the questions, the hours of work, crushed by the blue checkmark in the preferences tab.  

The point is…it helps to know what you are doing!  especially to avoid simple problems and prevent missed opportunities, like I had.  The quality of your recording matters a lot.  The listener can’t help but enjoy a more well-produced recording.  The playing content is the most important factor for sure, but having good audio quality certainly helps, or at least, won’t hurt your chances.

With many audition tapes coming up in the future, All-State auditions being recorded this year, and recording becoming the principle method of sharing anything at all right now, I didn’t want anyone else to suffer my past fate.  

I created a Free PDF guide to instrumental recording to help anyone learn some of the basics to instrumental recording, with the hope that it might answer your questions, make you feel empowered by knowing what cardioid microphones are, and generally avoid the suffering of not presenting your hard work as you want to. 

You can get that PDF guide by clicking HERE.