Whichever way you record your 'performance' it is important to get the finished product 'right'. Volumes have to be at the right levels, and the recording should be in Stereo (ie. have a left and a right channel).
Volumes are important as if you 'under record' your piece it will be too quiet for you to listen to. Yes, you could probably turn the volume up when you listen to it .. but then you don't want to have to turn volumes 'up' and then 'down' again every two minutes depending on what you are listening to. There is a critical level you should be aiming for to get the maximum volume possible without getting distortion. If you go beyond this point, 'clipping' will occur. This means that the part of the waveform that is 'over loud' is 'flattened' and the true sound is lost. In the example below you can see the horizontal red bit that replaces the actual grey waveform .. and the original sound is therefore lost. When we can't hear the sound as it should sound we call it 'distortion'.
That's why you can never 'restore' a clipped track back to what it sounded like originally. How does anyone know what the grey part of the wave form did before it became the red bit? It's lost!
Usually, clipping will show up as 'bunches' in certain places, as in the red lines in this Audacity Waveform below. And you can see clearly that the 'Volume Indicator' (which is green when the volume is OK; then yellow; then orange when it's borderline; and red when it's too loud) is showing it's 'in the red'.
And here is a recording which is way, way too loud and the whole piece has ended up 'in the red'.
The expression 'in the red' comes from when we used to monitor recording levels with meters. The section of the meter indicating the recording was too loud was coloured red.
If the recording went 'into the red' we'd have to stop the recording, set the volumes a tad lower .. and then do the recording again. But these days we are spoilt. If we under-record a piece (deliberately) we can then 'up' the volumes to that cut-off point digitally by NORMALIZING the track. In Audacity, you load the track in, then click the tab Effect (at the top); choose Normalize in the drop-down box; and Normalize it to eg. -2dB (0dB is the cut-off point).
So no need any more to be that accurate with your volume levels. Just make sure that they are under the maximum allowed.