Recording is hard. Okay, digging ditches in the rain and cold is hard, but discounting for obvious physical labor endeavors like that, recording music, and recording music worth listening to, is very, very difficult. Self-recording adds even more difficulty. 
There are some technical difficulties right from the start, like having a good acoustical space to record in, having access to the equipment (a recording device, microphones, stands, pop filters and the like), and having good, well-rehearsed music to record. But beyond that, things get tough. When you self-produce, you are creating a situation where you must do two very different things at the same time. You need to be an artistically engaged, immersed performer, filling the core of your performance. At the same time, you need to be an aware technician, making sure the performance is captured in a way that will make it listenable. An artistic and moving performance can be thickly veiled by poor technical efforts. Poor recording technique can hide wonderful parts of a performance, and bring to the fore distractions that detract from the performance.
As the performer, recording offers unique challenges. You have the usual performance pressure to make technical difficulties disappear, and to put across the spirit of your interpretation. You add to that the pressure of the invasive feel of the recording process itself. It’s as if the audience is in your lap, well inside your comfort boundary. And the ability to do multiple takes adds almost too much opportunity to try to jump higher, run faster. Every take is in competition to be the best, most meaningful performance ever, throughout the duration of the performance. Each small failure of nuance becomes a rock thrown at the performance that can distract you from the current moment of performance.
For me, the challenge becomes to disconnect from everything outside the performance moment, to connect to the flow, and to ignore the recording. And this separation from the technical has to happen in an instant after hitting “record”.
I think this will get easier. I’ve been doing this in some variation for over forty years and I still see it as an unsolved problem. Which may be why it qualifies as an art.
