Your One Chance - Post Your First-Shot Recording

BartK · 2026-04-10T15:52:29+00:00

This idea comes from @ShiroKuro in this thread. I hope you're not mad at me for jumping so quickly on your idea but I really love it. 🙂 The idea is to share your first take of the day of any piece you are working on to create pressure just like at a real live performance or audition. The Rules: You have ONE shot. You turn on the recording and start playing. Then you're done. No restarts. No second chances. It has to be the first attempt at playing the piece that day. No practicing it beforehand. You share your recording here in all its ugly glory so that we can all laugh at (just kidding 😉) encourage you. You can trim the ends of the recording so that we don't have to listen to you flipping pages, adjusting your seat, etc. But no sneaky twiddling before you start! So, who's game! Post your raw recordings and see if you can really play as well as you think!

danno858

Jane I actually didn't see this post until today. After I lost my place, I kept going anyway and I stopped caring whether or not I made mistakes. I made quite a few. You're right about finding recovery points - I ought to try that. Also, as someone else noted, this piece isn't really performance ready. I got rid of my Zoom H4N recorder and replaced it with an Audient Id14 audio interface. So my mics go into that, and that goes directly into my mac mini. Not sure if it is my imagination, but the quality of the recorded sound seems better to me. Also, I've got some EQ I'm learning to use. The reverb is just natural room reverb. Yesterday I did a whole bunch of testing - what affects the recordings the most is mic placement, for me anyway. I think I found a nice spot yesterday so now I just have to practice my pieces more so I can try to make a nice recording. There is official iTunes recording of this piano cover made by the author of the sheet music I was using and one on YouTube - on the YouTube one he even makes a mistake on his own composition - he hits two notes at once right next to each other at one point, and after having listened to his other recording so many times, I noticed it right off. No one is perfect, we are all human

pianoloverus

danno858 I don't think you should think of the score as a crutch although I'm not sure what you mean by that(Do you mean you think all your pieces should be memorized?), and I think it's OK and perfectly natural to play partially from muscle memory even if you're playing with the score. As far as moving your eyes back and forth between the score and the keyboard, I think you actually did that very well until you say you lost your place. I think that skill of moving your eyes is to a large extent a question of practice and you seem to do it correctly. Or maybe because the piece is quite long, you just didn't know some part in the second half as well which might be the reason you lost your place in the score at some point.
I think you played the piece well both technically and musically until losing your place in the score upset you.

danno858

pianoloverus I think I was trying to say that perhaps I do have it memorized or very close, and that maybe I am being a bit lazy relying on my "training wheels". However, I did not intend to convey that I think all pieces should be memorized. I would just like to be able to sit down and play a few pieces with no music as @Jane can. But I have no issue using my score all the time. I think you hit on the main reason I had trouble and that is because I'm not as comfortable with several measures from that point forward. So I wasn't able to catch myself back with score like I could in earlier portions of the piece. I need to use Jane's advice and start my practicing at different places throughout the piece randomly. I'll work on the last couple of pages and maybe try to record it again in a couple months. For now, Jane has inspired me to try to learn the Rachmaninoff D Major Prelude - no 4 op 23. So I've been working on that one, too now.

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