Recordings are a very important part of the musical business and we are not very informed about how it works inside. Recordings are the easiest way to reach all the audience that we want through internet sharing and social media. It is very useful as a promotion tool for our music. We should be introduced in what is best for us to record ourselves in a semi-professional way or be introduced a minimum to the complex world of rights in performance and recordings, theme that was not assessed in this research but is mostly not known for young musicians and sometimes might conclude in sound engineers or recording labels to gain profit of the musicians through a contract.
As a source of information I think that they shouldn’t be abused even if the musicians from the recordings are well informed because the composer made the effort of writing the score and that should be the base information that we need to use, otherwise, why don’t contemporary composers do one score and make the musicians play their music exactly as they want their composition or they imagined it and make the only possible recording of the piece that will be completely informed devaluation artistically the rest of recordings that would be made of them after this recording is released. The role of the musician is to interpret what the composers have written in paper and it is our job to take that and bring it to live, in a performance or in a recording. If we abuse in the usage of recordings we will not make the composer valuable, we will just copy and make collages of other musicians version of the piece.
Another reason why I discourage the usage of recordings as a source of information is that we get used to not generate our own musical ideas. Imagine that you face a new piece and you have as your only source of information the score and maybe some words from the composer or you have to make the world premiere of a newly composed piece and you have only the score. In that situation you won’t have recordings to listen to and you will have to interpret the score without it. If you are used to copy ideas, consciously or unconsciously, from other recordings your mind won’t be able to generate new ideas about how to approach artistically speaking the piece. For the recently composed piece, normally you are in touch with the composer because most of the times is the composer himself or herself the one who goes to the performer to find someone to play their piece. It is the choice from the composer to guide you completely or to make you interpret what is written in the score.
The most important reason for me to not listen to recordings is to try to make my authentic version of the piece I am playing, trying different interpretations and choose what I like the most based on my criteria to find my ideal version. Sometimes you can listen to works from the same composer for another instrument and how musicians from other instruments solve some artistic issues that you might be facing during the preparation of the piece or movement. For this what is a good practice is to record yourself short fragments or phrases that you don’t know how to approach and that might give a clue on how to do them. For this kind of recording it is not required a Digital Audio Workstation and microphones, with a digital recording device is enough to get yourself an idea on how it sounds. In the phone microphone could be also a possibility but normally they sometimes can be very good but they always struggle with the dynamic range. Most of the time they have constantly a limiter turned on that can’t be turned off. A limiter is a digital process that limits the maximum volume in the sound. When they receive a sound louder than the limiter is set up to, they distort the sound decreasing the volume down to the limiter. For example, if the limiter is set up to -5 dB, if a sound of -3dB is received, the recording device will distort the sound to go down to -5dB. This process also happens when we record ourselves with our phone in video for an audition or any other purpose. Some application forms now they recommend to use an external microphone to record the sound for the video, even though is going to be compressed down to an mp3 file for it not to occupy a lot of space in your phone, at least the sound won’t have the limiter and you will have the chance to have some dynamic range.