About recording yourself: I was asked to play recorder for a friend's funeral. This was serious business for an amateur player, and I was dissatisfied with the small clicks and irregularities that I heard in my playing.

I recorded myself and discovered that they could not be heard by others. I could hear them only because I was "right on top" of the instrument. The moral: recording yourself may show that you are better than you think.
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About listening to the audience: where I live we have a promoter who is death on coughing, especially from the cheap seats. There is a rumor that an audience which is coughing is bored and therefore being rude. This may be true; it also may be true that in a centrally-heated hall in one of the world's worst cities for allergies, people simply have to cough occasionally to resume breathing.

Anyhow, keep that idea in mind. A lot of coughing can mean boredom.

Funny story about that: The Woman once scheduled a medieval Christmas program which went an hour without an intermission. Well, that was okay, but it also went without even one beat's rest between parts. When were we supposed to cough? Finally, finally somebody missed an entrance and there was silence, and many people coughed. And then laughed, briefly and gently of course. The performers stared at us in bewilderment, as well they might, since it was not an amusing moment in the show.

It was a moment of pan-audience community.