Quality of pre-screen recordings

StringPop
Mon, 18 May 2015 14:53:28 +0000

A few years ago, a friend of my daughter, an outstanding violist, submitted fairly low recording quality prescreens (high playing quality), to the most selective conservatories, and passed all – except Juilliard. She was subsequently admitted to all of the remaining schools on her list. It’s completely impossible to know if it was the recording quality, of course (we are talking Juilliard here), but given her skill level, her admission results, and the fact that her prescreen recordings were of lower recording quality – lower than can be obtained from using a zoom in a nice space-- it does seem it could possibly have been a factor. Idk.

My d used the zoom recorder in a nice space three years ago and passed all of her prescreens. I think, talking recording quality, that the space is most important factor, and gave her the biggest headache. A really dead room – which she tried once, forced my daughter to work extra hard and actually changed the way she was bowing, so it didn’t work.

Re the zoom, I recently swapped some audio for my daughter’s old teacher. He had some zoom video recordings as well as professional audio recordings of the same performances, and I swapped the professional audio into the videos for him. For his purposes, the professional audio made sense; there was a difference between the two – the ambient noise was basically gone in the pro audio, and (I’m no recording engineer so not sure of the correct words) also a certain undesirable brashness/harshness was removed. But i can’t imagine the difference would be material in a prescreen–the performance was all there, and readily discernible. But who knows? Maybe it does. A fancy recording – perhaps with editing, which is unethical but done-- would make a difference in certain situations.

My anecdotal two cents.