Teaching the “Wire Choir”

Most music educators recognize the value of recording their students. The recording may be for the director to listen to (hearing all those things you miss while you are concentrating on 1001 things during a rehearsal) or it may be for the students to listen to themselves and engage in guided self-evaluation. Certainly, doing this is not new. When I was in high school back in the dark ages, my director purchased good mics, stands, and a reel-to-reel recorder (yes, it was that long ago) and regularly recorded our rehearsals and concerts.

Today, there are some great pieces of software available for you to record your students on computer. Audacity for Windows is open source and free. Free is good since it is a rare music educator who isn’t trying to run the best possible music program on a shoestring budget.

However, there are times when messing around with setting up a computer, a microphone and the rest just won’t work. For example, when you are teaching middle school students that have the attention span of a micro-second and you can’t spare a second to fuss with the computer. It is situations like these when a portable recording device really comes in handy. Especially when you can run it by battery power and use it anywhere.

In recent years, I have used mini-disc recorders for this purpose. My Sony NetMD MZ-N707, Sharp MD-SR60 recorders and Sony ECM-MS907 microphone have served me well, capturing rehearsals, playing tests wonderfully. I have even hooked them both up to a sound board with multiple microphones feeding into it and produced some decent concert recordings. Of course, I have also used them to record some of my personal practice sessions.

The downside of these devices is editing the recording. You have to record these to your computer real-time before editing can occur.

Those days are over are over now that I have my new Zoom H-2 digital recorder. The mics are built in, the device can be run from the electrical outlet or by battery. Certainly the mics are not the quality you would expect for a professional recording, but don’t dismiss them as cheap. They reproduce sound very well and there are no cords to mess with! There are four mics, not just two, with settings that enable you to record at 90 degrees, 120 degrees and 360 surround. The mics on the Zoom H-2 are the same as those as those on it’s much more expensive sibling, the H-4. Eldirol has a unit that many music educators like, but it costs more than the Zoom.

There are many more features including using the recorder as a mic for your computer through the included USB cable. It also uses a SD card up to 8GB that enables you to record up to 12 hours using the 16bit/44.1kHz WAV format. You can get up to 140 hours recording time at 128kbps MP3. For further details check out the manufacturers website.

The portability factor is great, in my view. No matter where your students are performing, you can get a very good recording of the concert for later review or simply just for “posterity”. You can also use a unit like this to record podcasts. If you look around online, you can get the Zoom H-2 for a reasonable price. It’s worth a look if you want something portable for recording your students or your own practice sessions.