Maintaining dynamics between multiple recordings
You don’t want Clair de Lune to sound the same loudness as the Revolutionary Etude. But if you follow the normalize routine to every individual piece, you will end up having them sound equally loud. Arrrggghhh!
To avoid that, what you should do is to record a very loud piece and use it to figure out what your recorder level should be, and your amplification (not normalized peak) should be. And then, use the same setting for all of your recordings.
It must be noted that to do this in Audacity, amplify works, but normalize doesn’t. Normalize brings every recording to same peak which is not what we want for quiet pieces. Whereas with amplify, you can tell Audacity to always increase the loudness by a fixed amount. So how do you figure out what that fixed amount (dB) is? Using recorded piece that contains the loudest possible sound you will every make in your performance, go to amplify, set the peak to your preference (e.g. -3dB), then write down the amplification dB number. From here on, for every recording, you set this same amplification, and disregard what the new peak ends up at.