Before I start my full-time job, I have to get this out of my system: Can I “just” record a short piece, nicely and accurately?

What I learned from making this recording (well, most of it I already knew)

• Playing the trombone convincingly is incredibly difficult. I’m a pretty good player and I know this piece really well, but
  • There are always little hiccups, no matter how many times I play the piece.
  • It’s not even in tune!
  • In the better of two ‘performances’ I played a really stupid, wrong note and so had to edit (1:24).
  • Third and subsequent run-throughs were terrible
• After all this experimenting with microphones I went to a different church (St Luke’s). With identical positioning of the single (omni/Jecklin) pair the acoustic was so very different that there’s now far too much reverberation. Whereas you can add reverb at home, you can’t remove it!
  • So: even more appreciation of the pro engineers who have to get this stuff right!
• Once again, if you’re going to do video, you need an extra person. The second camera that I had set up (which might have made it a bit more interesting) was on fixed focus and – despite careful calibration – came out blurred and useless.

Playing the trombone (and some other instruments, but I think particularly the trombone) is a bit like throwing thousands of darts and expecting them all to hit the right number. I have immense admiration for anybody who can play something like this without knocking anything over.