I've been taping my lessons for the last five years, and I can definitely hear a difference on the tape when I sing a phrase right after just having sung it wrong. I now know every minute detail of how my voice sounds, and I have been listening and studying for so long that, when I hear myself sing a note, I automatically know how it *felt* to do that.
It's weird, like a sympathetic kinesthetic listening skill. I can tell the difference between three different A-flats, and I can tell (just from listening to the tapes afterwards) what specific visual image I was thinking of at the time. It's all part of knowing your own voice, inside and out. I can go back through my closetful of tapes (Costco bulk tape purchases are my friend) and document the steps I have been taking to build my voice -- last February I lacked step x, a couple months before that I hadn't mastered step y, and so on. It's very interesting, and incredibly valuable.
I encourage everyone who possibly can, to tape their voice. I carry a $20 walkman with me in my singing bag -- I tape rehearsals, master classes, performances, sometimes my practice sessions. My teacher's studio has a sony professional walkman with an external mike, but I have learned to hear through the (slight) hiss of my little cheap recorder, too. I'm now also experimenting with a minidisc recorder, although I find the distortion is horrible (way too "live" even in big rooms), and I can play tapes (but not minidiscs) at my computer, in my car, on the stairstepper, etc.
The only think I would warn against are those tiny mini dictaphones: the vocal quality is truly terrible. I keep on in my glove compartment, just in case, but wouldn't expect to get any tonal, vocal value out of it; just things like phrasing, projection, diction, pitch, etc.
Isabelle B.
--- Dre de Man <dredeman@y...> wrote: > Tape recorders are about the worst machines you can > think of to record music. Every taperecorder has its > own way of colouring tones, so no 2 machines will > reproduce the tones the same. Then cheap microhpones > are crappy, and expensie microhones not used well, > don't giev a real image as well
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y...
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