Virtual choir for Easter

[UTTransplant]

Anyone ever involved with Christian church music knows the Easter season always has a lot of special music. For choir singers like me, missing the Easter anthems has been one of the hardest things about the pandemic. My choir director has risen to the challenge though, and we have been doing about one virtual anthem a month, most of the pretty simple four part harmony. She has figured out the technology (a challenge for a self-admitted non-technical person), and it is grand. For Easter she is going all out. We have a 5 part harmony piece 15 pages long that will have trumpets, French horns, and piano added. We will be having Zoom rehearsals, and we will be able to sing to a video of her directing us which should clean up some of the phrasing starts and stops. I am so excited! We won’t have in-person choir until fall, but this is a nice way to keep us involved.

 

[Tom]

Which software is your director using? Our uke band has been doing something similar, but it requires individual audio &/or video recordings to be "stacked" & sync'd. Attempting to do a "group" play/sing via something like zoom doesn't work, because anyone playing/singing will automatically mute everyone else. Appreciate any suggestions to replace our "stacked audio/video" process; They would be VERY welcome.

 

[UTTransplant]

She does use a stacked approach. She had to go buy a much more powerful desktop computer to manage just the 15 singers we have (some of older members don’t participate). In the audio accompaniment track she uses a measure of clicks. We clap on the last beat of the measure, and she syncs that. Harder to do while playing an instrument, but maybe a slap on the instrument would do the same thing. We listen to the accompaniment track on one device using headphones while we record on a second device. For the Zoom, we will all be muted so we can sing as soloists with the accompaniment. I will ask her the specific programs she uses.

 

[Tom]

A big thanks. That sounds like the procedure our uke band director uses.

 

[UTTransplant]

Here is my director’s reply: “For our virtual performance videos, I use Audacity for the audio editing, and DaVinci Resolve 16 for the video editing. Both are free, and both work on both pcs or macs. But DaVinci Resolve 16 has a steeper learning curve, at least for me, as I had never done any video editing before.”

 

[Tom]

Thanks. I'll pass it along.

 

[SpencerPJ]

Excited you are keeping it going. Post a link to your performance once done, this darn virus sure has changed our services (not for the better either). Looking for to larger and safe gatherings going forward.

 

[MN Blue Skies]

Pam, please a post a link to your performance. I would love to hear it!