This is a recording for a university assignment. It is my first attempt at field recording, and I definitely learnt a few things about recording and editing. 

I recorded my brother Rhys Thompson playing this piece in my bedroom. It is a small carpeted room with some brick and some drywall walls and an odd shape, and very little natural resonance. I had my brother stand as close to the centre of the room as possible, but slightly closer to one side (one made of drywall) of the room. Acoustically, this seemed like a nice area of the room. 

I tested several mic placements while he practised the piece on his viola, including close to the soundholes, a few metres back, close to the scroll, close and slightly further away from the rear soundboard of the instrument (nice, but sort of muddy), and about 45cm away from the instrument, above where the strings were bowed. This final point was a good compromise of clarity and volume, and gave a fairly balanced response to the strings (the lower strings were invariably louder). 

The mic was held so that each of the cardioid patterns were catching the maximum sound from the instrument, with one pointed at the bridge, and the other at the scroll of the instrument. 
We did several takes of the entire piece. If Rhys made a mistake, he mentioned the bar he was resuming from and continued to play. He has not played or practised viola for around 2 years so it took some time for him to get warmed up. He also had a cold so was sniffling throughout the recording.

We then did a few takes of each section of the piece to ensure I would have enough to work with when editing. To finish, we ran through the whole piece once more, which turned out to be the best take. I chose this as the base for editing. 

There were only a few major flaws, including the ending chord (which I replaced with a better recording), and a sound where I bumped the mic at 1’24”. I used the ‘generate silence’ tool in Amadeus pro for the quaver rest to remove the mic knocking sound, and pasted in another take of that section. 

The viola’s old strings were quite rough and meant that there was a raspy-ness and occasional squeak to the sound which I wasn't particularly happy with. 

I "exported to itunes" at 320kbps. 

The final product isn't perfect, but the project tested my abilities and I feel that I was able to improve the original recordings to something which documents my brother’s playing. More time could certainly be spent fine tuning this track.

Ehren Thompson