Recording as a teaching tool

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | By Philip Johnston

s any video-camera-toting sports coach will tell you, being able to record students is an endlessly versatile teaching option. Which is why most sports coaches are video-camera-toting in the first place.

If you've ever thought about being able to record your own students, here's what you need to know:

Any money you spend on recording facilities for your studio will be more than recouped in increased retention rates. More than recouped.

The fresh lesson options that are only possible with recording are just that good.

Remember, all teachers can say...

“let’s try that one more time”.

But only teachers with recording facilities can say ...

“let’s listen to what just happened”.

That single sentence can completely change the way you do your job. What just happened has always been the fuel music teachers depend on to generate feedback, but like any musical performance, what just happened evaporates the instant it takes place, survives only in the memory, and less accurately so with every passing second. Make a recording though, and what just happened can be referenced, as surely as if it were notes in a score.

Teaching is a whole different game once that's possible.

How this IMT Guide will help

This guide doesn’t go into how to record—a quick google of that topic will list plenty of advice on setting reverb levels, adding EQ and creative microphone placement, if you really think you need to know. But honestly, while that information might help a sound engineer with their job, it's not really going to help you with yours. Instead, we'll be targeting a more interesting question that isn't talked about so much:

What’s recording for? Specifically, how can you use it as a teaching tool? And why is being able to sit down with your student and listen together to what just happened so transformative?

Let IMT count the ways...

| Progress Snapshots | Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra | Interpretation Genie | Peer Review Workshops | Second Opinions | Action Replays | Before & After | Pressure Testing | Details Trawling | Demonstrations | Template of What's Possible | Consistency Checks | Studio Archives |

#1: Progress Snapshots

When a student’s piece sounds less like the Clementi you assigned, and more like the audition rounds of the Ligeti Sightreading Championship for Foot Pianists, it’s tempting to reassure them with “don’t worry, it’s definitely improving”. The power of positive reinforcement and all that.

Unfortunately, given that most of those same students have grown up marinating in the mantra of “you’re so clever” from every significant adult in their lives, your carefully phrased reassurance can sound exactly like the empty encouragement that it is.

But what if this time, the piece is genuinely improving, and the encouragement is not empty, but necessary for this self-doubting student to move forward? How can you prove to your student that progress is actually being made?

Building a progress archive

It only takes a couple of minutes, but if once a fortnight you were to record your student playing their piece—one take, as much as they can, warts and all, no editing— before long you’ll actually have a fascinating resource that no teacher without recording facilities can offer: a running archive of their progress:

• MarkSmith_Sonatina_April2.mp3
• MarkSmith_Sonatina_April16.mp3
• MarkSmith_Sonatina_April30.mp3
• MarkSmith_Sonatina_May6.mp3
  

This now means that the next time Mark is complaining that his Sonatina is just too hard and it’s not improving and never will, don’t argue with him. Load up a recording from 6 weeks ago, and let him hear it for himself. Nine times out of ten the transformation will be self evident beyond any possibility of further argument, robbing him of the premise that progress is impossible.

When there is no progress...

On the odd occasion where there actually was no improvement (we're all great teachers, but it does happen), then that’s something you need to acknowledge. Either way, the lesson that follows can be based on actual rather than revisionist history of the Sonatina’s past. And your students can no longer hide behind “I’ll never get this” as an alternative to quietly getting on with it.

| Progress Snapshots | Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra | Interpretation Genie | Peer Review Workshops | Second Opinions | Action Replays | Before & After | Pressure Testing | Details Trawling | Demonstrations | Template of What's Possible | Consistency Checks | Studio Archives |

#2: Your own Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra

You’ve no doubt had students working in ensembles before, but recording facilities allow an ensemble of an entirely different type, as billed so grandly above: The Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra. ADSO, if you prefer.

Um..."Asynchronous"?...

It simply means that the ensemble members don’t have to be physically in the same space at the same time. Student #1 can record their part on Monday, and then student #2 listens to that recording at their Wednesday lesson while adding a track of their own.

In this way, you could actually have every student in a piano studio contributing not to a duet, or an quartet, but a dodecatet...you need a piano bench spanning a football field for that normally.

The "Asyncronous" possibilities in recording might seem to make for some epic ensemble options, but it’s nothing compared with what the “Doppleganger” factor opens up.

"Doppleganger"?

Remember, once a student has recorded themselves, there’s no reason that they cannot record an additional track. Now they're contributing twice to the same ensemble. And you don’t have to stop at two—the number of tracks you can record is limited only by the specs of your computer, and unless your computer is very old, we’re talking about a lot of tracks.

So your small studio of 10 students—if they each contribute 5 tracks the big studio Ensemble Project—can be responsible for a 50 track epic.

Hence “Studio Orchestra”, because with forces that massive, that’s really what it is.

Of course, if you really want to dial this up...

...you could then email your mega ADSO recording to another studio—perhaps one that features different instruments—and double the size of the forces involved, until even Wagner would tell everyone to settle down before somebody loses an eye…

| Progress Snapshots | Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra | Interpretation Genie | Peer Review Workshops | Second Opinions | Action Replays | Before & After | Pressure Testing | Details Trawling | Demonstrations | Template of What's Possible | Consistency Checks | Studio Archives |

#3: Summoning the Interpretation Genie Within

At any studio recital, some performances are inevitably—how might the euphemism go?— beyond reproach, but thoroughly forgettable.

You know the performances I’m talking about, and it’s hard to get mad with the students concerned; every dynamic marking is meticulously observed, every note is in place, every rhythm tight, yet somehow it all completely fails to capture—much less keep—a listener’s attention. When the final note dies away (exactly four beats, because it was a whole note), the performance is subjected to awful sound of golf-gallery-meek polite applause. Next please.

If you’ve got your own recording facilities, you can free such students from the constraints of their pencils-all-the-same-length hypercorrectness, and have them sparking with fresh—even outrageous—interpretation possibilities.

Shuffled, a dozen ways

It all starts by telling your student that they’ll be recording their piece during the lesson. Not recording it just once, but a dozen times. That’s a lot, they'll say. They're right, but it's your next directive that's really going to give them a nosebleed:

… every one of these twelve performances must be completely unlike all the others.

Whoa. What?

When they protest that they can’t think of twelve different ways to play the piece—and they will protest long before they get to the twelfth incarnation—before you hit the record button, there is a phrase you can teach them to help them summon the interpretation genie within:

“I wonder what would happen if…”

So, for example:

I wonder what would happen if this passage were taken at a clip faster than I normally do? Or a metronome-key-width slower?

I wonder what would happen if I took more time to tie off phrases? Or if instead I pushed through the phrase transitions a little more?

I wonder what would happen if the staccatos on page 4 were really short? Or just merely non legato?

And I wonder what would happen if this crescendo were gradual at the start, and then ramped up suddenly? Or if it were steady all the way through? Or barely there? Or the single biggest crescendo in the piece?

Or a diminuendo?

Thanks to your recording equipment, the student doesn’t just have to wonder if these ideas are laudable or lunacy. They can actually try each option, while you record the results—and then sit back with you and assess the various takes afterwards. Because you can replay the recordings as many times as you need, you can sift through the mass for ideas that are worth drafting into the Official Performance Version.

As a practice technique, this is known as “Experimenting” (if you want your students to learn eaxctly how it works so they can do it at home too, it has its own detailed student-friendly entry on pages 135-138 of Practiceopedia), and it means that the interpretation they arrive at is a showcase of the very best of hundreds of ideas trialled, instead of a faithful but mindless recreation of the first playable option they tried that didn’t make the cat leave the room.

Compiling the best ideas

So from the "I wonder what would happen if..." example list above, your student might listen to all the recordings, and lock in the following for the Ideal Version:

A clip faster, but with more time to tie off phrases, takes 4-7 showed that the phrase transitions really do need time to breathe. The crescendo on page 2 really works best when it’s both steady and subtle, while those staccatos on page 4 never seemed to be in time if they were too short. So detatched, but not spiky.

Your student is not guessing any of this. Nor are they simply following your directives, or compliantly painting-by-numbers from whatever is in the score. They’ve run experiments, and have transformed their interpretative picture of the piece based on the recordings—hard evidence—of the results.

| Progress Snapshots | Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra | Interpretation Genie | Peer Review Workshops | Second Opinions | Action Replays | Before & After | Pressure Testing | Details Trawling | Demonstrations | Template of What's Possible | Consistency Checks | Studio Archives |

#4: 24/7 Peer Review Workshops

Some students will love this idea, others will hate it, but be certain of this: all of them will practice harder if you even hint that it might be happening...

...what if—instead of the recordings you make just being a private resource for you and your student—you make it known that you’ll be playing them to other students, who would then be giving written feedback ?

Picture what this new policy means for your student at their lesson. They record their piece, and then a week later, there’s a small stack of handwritten notes waiting for them as they come in.

Not from you. From their peers.

Brickbats or bouquets, you can bet they'll be fascinated to find out what those notes have to say.

...because next week, it might be you...

Of course, those giving comments know that at some stage during the year, it will be their recording that will be being assessed like this. If you ever need to light a fuse under a student, just hint that their turn is coming up. Or, If you’re feeling just a little evil, and want to keep your students permanently on their toes...

... let everyone know that it could happen to anyone at any lesson. Mwuhahahaha.

Making your students portable

Obviously the idea of peer assessment is nothing new for music students—they've all been to workshops and masterclasses—but traditionally the only way to get it done is for all your students to be in the same space at the same time.

Recordings free the process up by capturing your student's performance, making it portable, and having it potentially present at every lesson you teach.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to lose lesson time to such peer feedback generation, you can always email the recording to your other students, ask them to listen, and then have them email their responses at their (deadline limited) leisure.

The student who made the recording gets their comments, your lesson time is untouched, your other students get regular practice in critically assessing what they hear, periodic tastes of fresh repertoire, and reminders that one day, maybe soon, it’s going to be their tur, so they had better practice intelligently. It’s a win-win-win-win that makes your studio more dynamic, the lessons more unpredictable, and has your students preparing harder.

| Progress Snapshots | Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra | Interpretation Genie | Peer Review Workshops | Second Opinions | Action Replays | Before & After | Pressure Testing | Details Trawling | Demonstrations | Template of What's Possible | Consistency Checks | Studio Archives |

#5: A wide, wide world of second opinions

Peer assessment of recordings is a great way to add spice to any student’s preparation, but if you really want to shift things up a gear, and turn the whole world into one giant masterclass, then consider sending recordings to other teachers. In much the same way that doctors will email xrays to colleagues for a second opinion, you don’t have to be bounded by geography in this—there’s no reason that teachers in different continents cannot give feedback on each other’s students in this way.

Again, picture it from the student’s point of view...

You’ve just recorded the piece that you’ve worked so hard on, and now you know it’s being emailed to the other side of the world for comment from a professor of woodwind studies at a conservatorium your teacher used to study at. Just how hard will you be listening next lesson when the feedback is unveiled? How much extra practice would you put in the next time a recording like that is to be made?

It’s not just rhetoric when I tell people that there’s never been a better time to be a music teacher. Like many of the other ideas outlined in this article, this second-opinion teaching tactic is only possible in an age of both cheap recording and universal email, and you're standing in it right now.

Don't stop there! Show me more great ideas for using recordings

| Progress Snapshots | Asynchronous Doppleganger Studio Orchestra | Interpretation Genie | Peer Review Workshops | Second Opinions | Action Replays | Before & After | Pressure Testing | Details Trawling | Demonstrations | Template of What's Possible | Consistency Checks | Studio Archives |