I’ve just completed my first two sets of Cello lessons. They exceeded all of my expectations – my niece is a wonderful teacher.
Very interestingly, (because I was trying to learn and grow with my Cello playing), I found that in the beginning, when I could barely play anything – just a little playing went a long way. Once I got more confident, rather than listen to the song and fit the Cello in like I would a bass part, I noodled and over played and did it a bit too much and it gummed up the songs.
In parallel, I also have not been happy with the sound I’m my recordings – the Cello is deceptively booming but at the same time can be hard to hear. I have read in my Mike Senior Mixing book that just about every track needs a high pass filter to filter out low frequency “information”, and I agree. Low frequency sounds seem to eat up the space you can pack in a mix, so it must be trimmed.
I also applied this same high pass filtering to the next song and I finally understand where all that low frequency “schmutz” was in my recordings.
All of these things combined have been quite the excellent education and journey.