I recently had an invitation to visit the music classroom of @tgianno to assist them with the preparation for a music competition.  The string ensemble was very successful at the local music festival competition, scoring excellent results which entitled them to compete at the next level of the music festival.

In today’s terms, participating in the second level of the competition means preparing a recording of two contrasting pieces under supervision of a festival officer. My role in the process was to be the recording engineer. The recording was completed on a laptop running Sonar Software and equipped with a Pocket VX digital interface which connects to a mixer, in this case with 2 Shure microphones.

After a warm up session and the traditional round of tuning, we recorded each selection twice. Following the session, we listened to the recordings as a group. The students collectively decided which recordings were the best, and should therefore be submitted to the festival evaluators. The selected files were burned to a CD and mailed to the festival office in the a date stamped envelope. I used Audacity, a free audio recorder/editor for Windows and OSX computers to convert the files to mp3 format.

Enjoy listening to the student recordings:  March and Tango

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I appreciated the opportunity to participate in @tgianno’s music project.

~ Mark