The Educational Value of Professional Recordings

The amazing advances in technology over the past several decades have included the gear, equipment and methods used in recording live audio. Producing a quality recording of the live performance of your school’s music ensemble has gone from extremely difficult and costly to relatively easy and inexpensive.

No longer is there a need for reel-to-reel or cassette recorders, multiple microphones with stands and cables, and no way to mix or remix the recording. Add CD-burning recorders and the corresponding players and duplicators, mixers with dozens of channels, and wiring snakes to the pile of devices that technology has almost made obsolete.

With inexpensive digital recorders, a wireless microphone or two, and software available and often free on most computers, a top-quality recording can be easily made and just as easily distributed through the Internet. So why shell out your hard-earned fundraising dollars to have it done professionally?

Education. Learning. Preservation. Legacy. Pride.
Your students will be educated. The entire process is an educational experience for each one of your students. It clearly involves music selection, rehearsal, preparation and performance. Doing a professional recording enhances all of those aspects of your music program even though you and your students have gone through them dozens (or hundreds) of times before.

Selecting the right program to be captured in this manner is the first step and an important one that could and should involve your students. Their focus during rehearsals will be sharper and more intent on not only playing their parts well, but in making music and making it with the power and presence that the composer intended initially. They will not only listen to themselves, but to the entire group and develop ways to improve the balance, phrasing and presentation of the piece. Your ensemble’s preparation will be thorough – from first chair to last seat. And the energy they bring to the performance, despite not being in front of an audience of friends and family will be palatable. And they will love doing it all.

They will learn – not only through the music selected and the efforts made in rehearsal and preparation, but about the recording process itself, which will start with the selection of a performance site. Many schools have superb performing arts centers to utilize for this purpose and can use it for this effort. Renting your community’s premier theater space would be an option for those without such a school-based facility, but should be considered even for those that have their own quality theater. Being on a stage where admired performers have created wonderful experiences that some have witnessed brings a higher level of appreciation for their own talents to the students.

They will continue to learn. During the live performance, the learning increases as the students are exposed to the equipment needed to make the recording and the detail the professionals put into each aspect of the process. Ask the recording crew to give the students a look and overview of the recording gear at the end of the cable and include them in determining them in the setup on that stage. Where the mics are, how each section is arranged and recorded, how the sounds are captured while retaining the line-of- sight needed for a conducted performance. And some of your students should be involved in the mixing of the recording that will follow, assisting in producing the final product, a learning experience in itself. A future recording engineer may be lurking in your brass section or singing bass in your chorus.

And they will learn about themselves. Repeated takes of entire pieces or certain sections will draw out their best efforts time and time again. Listening to each other will become more and more acute, more and more necessary to get the sound just right. Retaining focus after an extended amount of time spent giving their best will task their personal character as well as physical abilities – and will help them develop as humans as well as musicians. Getting it right takes effort, more than any single performance ever would or will. And it takes everyone to give their best at the same time to get it right.

Your students’ efforts will be preserved. The recording will capture their collective efforts, energy, talent and hope. It will serve to capture that moment in time for those students in their lives. It represents the music they selected, the efforts they put into rehearsals and preparations, their skills and talents displayed on that stage, their lives to that point. It will serve as a marker in time for them, something that they can recall both individually and collectively. Each student was there as an individual and there as a member of their ensemble. The media you choose to capture and share will outlast you and them.

And their legacy lives on. The recording will stand as a testament to their efforts, a level of quality to be envied, an effort to be shared, a commitment to be praised. Each following group will want the same. Each will want to experience the thrill of producing their own recording, despite the warnings about the hours of rehearsal and preparation required, despite the challenges they know are connected to such an enterprise. As with many such activities undertaken by a school, this can become an annual tradition, although making such a recording once every four years will ensure that every committed ensemble member will get to experience it all once during their school years. But rest assured, each will want their own legacy.

Your students will be proud. They will be proud of their part in this recording, proud of their participation in your program, proud of being in a school that values the performing arts enough to support this type of effort, proud to be a musician. So why should you spend your hard-earned fundraising dollars to make a professional recording? Because you want your students to be educated, to learn new things, to have their efforts preserved, to establish their own legacy. You want your students to be proud.

Steffen Parker is a retired music educator, event organizer, maple sugar maker, and Information Technology specialist from Vermont who serves as the Performing Arts/Technology representative on the NFHS High School Today Publications Committee. He received the NFHS Citation Award in 2017 and the Ellen McCulloch- Lovell Award in Arts Education in 2021.