Quality of pre-screen recordings

glassharmonica
Mon, 18 May 2015 13:53:13 +0000

From what I can tell, recording quality matters more at some places than others. My daughter used a consumer-quality camcorder in a good hall but no special mic setup for her college prescreens (5 years ago) and passed all the screens. But she did not need to prescreen Juilliard because she was in the precollege and I have been told that for Juilliard prescreen recording quality may matter. For grad school she made her prescreens herself using a Zoom Q3 or whatever it’s called, that is about 5 years old; again, passed all of them. Her reasoning is that the panel can appreciate the playing even if it’s not a professional recording and that multiple takes are not really necessary because you will not be eliminated because of a small blip near the end of a passage… but I don’t know. Maybe she got lucky. I know parents who have spent a fortune doing studio-quality recordings. Also–my daughter was recently surprised to be rejected from a competition on the tape round, but hers was made with the Zoom recorder and no professional mic set up. I’m thinking that others are spending money on recording (and probably editing recordings) and that a home-made recording put her at a disadvantage, regardless of her playing.