It's only really important to know about the editing so that you will find on your own what is true and important about your playing. If you hear the perfect CD, then you think, I'll never be that good. So the CD creates a semi-permanent negative reality that holds you back. And I think it is a big problem in Classical and Early music performance right now. And yes, if you send me two takes, each of which had a mistake very other bar, but never exactly in the same place, I could edit it perfect.
But the important thing is to not lose sight of the music. Forget about the artificial standard and just enjoy this amazing, life altering music. I spent about six months trying to learn the Song of the Birds by Francesco--the F minor version, and I could never play it up to my standard. II could play it by slightly slowing downn the fast notes, and a few other tricks, but at the end ofthe day, it was not good enough. It was a pretty big disappointment. But I could record it, I guess, a bar at a time.....but then it would cross some line. But it was a great challenge. Every day is square one for me, and that's OK. But hey, maybe someday I'll play that piece--errrrrrr big maybe. dt At 05:29 PM 11/7/2010, you wrote: >Dear David, > >I had a very mixed reaction to your post. I am in no way a >professional musician, though I consider myself a serious, if not a >very accomplished, amateur (at least in the etymological sense of >the word). Often times I have listened to lute recordings and >thought, "I might as well just quit. I'll never play like that." I >can get through any given piece without an actual mistake (i.e., >playing a wrong note) only one time in a hundred perhaps and never >without "twangs, splats, and squeaks." So, I was consoled to learn >that even professional musicians may have up to 2,200 edits per CD. >Perhaps if I could edit myself "every 2 seconds," I wouldn't sound >so bad after all. It could well be that commercial CDs set >artificially and therefore unrealistically high standards of performance. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
