Home Recording Setup
Last updated: Apr 6, 2024
I started making videos of myself playing the organ and now I can practice longer and faster without my wrists hurting.
Setup
A first version of this setup is in an Instagram post.
This is what I use to make home recordings of organ music.
To me, one of the most important requirements is convenience, otherwise I don’t make recordings very often.
From the headphone jack on the organ, I split between headphones (for monitoring) and an audio cable to my phone.
This is the first splitter.
Then I used a different splitter to make the audio in work with the shared audio in/out phone jack.
For audio only recordings, the phone recording app is Simple Voice Recorder.
For video recordings, I use the phone’s camera.
Since the phone’s audio jack has only one microphone input, the recording is a mono track. But it’s easy to make it sound like a nice stereo track with some reverb in Audacity.
Results
I posted some recordings on a YouTube playlist of Jesu, Meine Freude. The setup is so simple that I easily take it with me and use it on other electronic organs, like the one in a recording of Psalm 51:6.
As soon as I started watching the video of my hands, I noticed that my pinkies often stick straight out. I vaguely remembered one of my organ teachers telling me that my pinkies shouldn’t be straight, but I couldn’t remember why, and clearly I hadn’t learned how to stop it. I searched online, and found that it’s a sign of too much tension.
Raised fifth fingers in the majority of piano students are relatively harmless, but they do slow down the fifth finger action and cause unnecessary tension in the wrist.
A good way to experience this is to ask the student to flop their hand onto their knee – fully relaxed – then raise the fifth finger. They should notice increased tension in the wrist.
And some nice practice ideas to fix it.
Play as slowly as necessary until you can relax your pinky. I guarantee you can play one note a minute with a relaxed pinky. Then slowly increase speed. If there’s one thing that proper practice is good for, it’s breaking bad habits. But, like anything else worth doing, it will take time. Be patient.
If you’re not using your pinky in a given moment, I think it’s more important that it’s just relaxed/ready for action. If you notice your pinky is tense when you’re not using it, try play scales very slowly, and move around the fingers that are not currently pressing a key. E.g. 3 is pressing, move 2,4,5 around smoothly (stretch out, contract). This might help relax your fingers a bit. Don’t worry about how it looks, but focus on how it feels.
It reminded me of what I already knew: Extra movement often interferes with making music, and breaking bad habits requires deliberate, often slow, practice.
At first, I struggled to remove the habit of tension in my hands. Later, I noticed the benefits. For example, I was previously unable to play the Fanfare by J. Lemmens more than two or three times in a row without my hands hurting. Without the tension, I can keep practicing over and over and it doesn’t hurt at all.