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
~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca 
Thanks again for coming to record the Northlake group. We appreciated it so much! These students have come a long way in two years, despite having 30 minute music periods this year. Some days we barely had time to play anything after setting up the room and tuning. I signed them up for the music festival because they needed a challenge to inspire them to practise and they rose to the occasion – more than I ever expected. I think they even surprised themselves. I hope we can get together again next year for a similar project.