Recording: Sor Studies

I want to make a point of recording myself more often and getting comfortable in front of a mic, so I am planning to record something at least once a week when possible. Today, I sat down with my book of Sor Studies and recorded a few that I have worked on occasionally. I've never really tried to memorize these studies, but I have worked on more than half of them in the book and I like to just come back to them from time to time and apply whatever new things I've learned since the last time. They're perpetually works in progress for me, but I am not particularly interested in performing them so I just use them to see how I'm doing. There's always something new to discover in them, and there's an awful lot of them, so I consider it one of the best bang-for-buck guitar books I've ever bought.

My recording setup and my Extreme Isolation Headphones let me listen to myself as the mic hears me even as I'm playing, because the sound of the guitar in the room doesn't bleed through so much into the headphones. Normally, I hate that, because it sounds weird without the room acoustics. But I realized today that it's a handy tool for practicing, as well; it lets you hear what you're doing approximately as an audience would. It makes it obvious how much you need to exaggerate things like tone color changes, dynamics, etc in order to get them across to the listener.

Here's today's recording:

Fernando Sor: Studies Op. 44 no. 11, Op. 60 no. 7, Op. 44 no. 9 by wbajzek