Carolyn and others have shared some videos and audio clips of musical
groups who have managed to perform together even though they were
physically apart. I'd like to know if anyone in CES is willing to
experiment in doing the same. Carolyn and I think that if we can put
together a performance or more this way, there would be some nice
benefits. First of all, we keep singing together. Second, we can offer
music to those in our audiences where we have their email addresses. And
third, if we get sophisticated enough, perhaps we could produce a CES
channel on Youtube for the duration of the corona season.
How do we do this? I certainly don't have all the answers, but with a
little help, we can get started. Last week I discovered that I had
GarageBand on my MacBook and began to play around with it. GarageBand is
an application that lets you lay down tracks of individual music and
combine them. As I am learning, you can also massage the individual parts
a bit to get a more professional sound.
A few days ago, I took a simple version of Wade in the Water and, using
GarageBand, recorded the bass, the tenor, and the soprano parts separately
using a built-in metronome to coordinate. Then I put them together and
they more or less matched up. This suggested that we could put voices
together though we be apart. I am attaching the MP3 version I produced so
you can see the result. Please don't judge it too harshly; it's just a
proof of concept recording.
Anyway, the next step is to put together voices from separate locations. I
would like to get at least one voice from each SATB group to use their
iphone (or android I think would also work) to record a video of the same
song, sung at the same pace, from the same score. Could I propose we use
the Star-Spangled Banner we pretty much have under our belt? Set a
metronome at 100 and start from the "O say" in measure 5 in the score we
sing from.
Ideally, we would individually sing to a track of the accompaniment, but
for now let's try singing from the score to the metronome pace.
You would record this as a video, but at this point the sound is more
important than our beautiful faces. In combining the voices, I will strip
off the video portion -- at least for now -- so that I can focus on the
audio. Then email it to me at: johnwanat@xxxxxxxxx I will try to
put the voices together and send you all the combined sound. Then, who
knows what would happen. Ideally we will be able to get the video back in
the final product.
I am hoping that there are some in CES who have done something like this
before (Steven, Blair, Ken, Pat?). If so, please let me know. Anyway, if
you are interested, send me a video and I'll get started.
Hopefully,
John
