For the past 13 years or so I’ve had these reels of 1/2‑inch tape sitting in the top of my closet. They were made by the legendary engineer David Hancock, the last recordings he made before his death (of Parkinson’s disease). I must have been about 11 when these tapes were made, and had been studying piano with his wife, Eleanor, for a couple of years.
Gene and Jason at the Fred Plaut studio rolled out their reel-to-reel machine the other day and helped me transfer them to digital files:
Motion blur. That tape is going by at 30 inches per second!
Here is 11-year-old me playing Prokofiev’s third piano sonata (approximately six and a half years before I learned what the marking p stood for):
Here is a little about the microphones David apparently used to record this.
Here are the Fred Plaut’s microphones, all in a pile:
$40,000 worth of microphone. And a razor blade!